Description
We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to set architectural direction across the Assessments group at Instructure. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will own the architectural direction across multiple domains, including Canvas by Instructure and Mastery, and several services and third-party integrations.
Responsibilities:
- Set architectural direction across Assessments domains, and keep it aligned with the wider engineering strategy.
- Own decisions end to end, bringing recommendations, getting alignment, and driving them to resolution with a date attached.
- Write and maintain technical specifications, design records, and decision documents that other teams build against.
- Define the boundaries between our services and adjacent domains, including core platform, data, quality engineering, and security.
- Collaborate with your director to lead build-versus-buy evaluations with third-party vendors and document commitments.
- Coach and sponsor senior and staff engineers to take on architectural work themselves.
- Set the standard for using AI in engineering work and share best practices.
- Shape reliability and testing strategy across the group and reduce repeated on-call load.
Requirements:
- 10 or more years of building and operating production software, with several years at staff level or above.
- A track record of driving architecture decisions to completion across multiple teams.
- Clear technical writing skills that make complex trade-offs legible to engineers, product, and executives.
- Evidence of growing other senior engineers through mentoring, sponsorship, or both.
- Proficiency with building and maintaining software on cloud-native platforms, preferably AWS.
- Comfort with ambiguity, including defining problems before solving them.
- Good judgment about scope and delegation of work.
Nice to have:
- Experience with assessment, learning, or education technology systems.
- Experience consolidating or replacing legacy systems while they remain in production.
- Multi-tenant, sharded, or high-volume platform experience.
- Experience with Ruby on Rails.
Benefits:
- Competitive compensation and ownership program.
- Flexible work culture with remote, hybrid, and in-office collaboration spaces.
- Generous time off, including local holidays and an annual 'Dim the Lights' period.
- Comprehensive wellness programs and mental health support.
- Learning and development resources, including professional development tools and tuition reimbursement.
- Technology and tools needed to do your best work.
- Motivosity employee recognition program.
- Culture rooted in inclusivity, support, and meaningful connection.