Principal Engineer

Who you are

• This is a role for someone who thinks in systems, ships with urgency, and elevates everyone around them
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in scaling distributed systems and evolving legacy architectures
• Ideal candidate brings a strong background in Ruby/Rails
• Track record of defining and executing technical strategy across multiple product domains or teams — not just within one team
• Passion for mentoring engineers and guiding teams through architectural change
• Deep expertise in domain-driven design, API design, SOA and event-driven architectures
• Experience with payroll, workforce management, or similarly complex business domains is a strong plus
• Proven ability to influence without authority — you drive alignment through clarity of thought and collaboration
• Strong communication skills: you can explain complex technical decisions to engineers, PMs, and executives alike
• Active, high-leverage AI fluency — you use AI tools daily to improve your outcomes as an engineer and have helped teams adopt AI to create leverage, not slop
• Comfort operating in a high-velocity environment where shipping fast and iterating matters
• Experience comes in many forms—so if you're excited about this role, even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications, we encourage you to apply!

What the job involves

• As Principal Engineer, Core Product, you'll be the senior technical leader across Homebase's most critical product domains: Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, HR Management (HRM)
• You’ll contribute to Homebase business goals by thinking 18+ months in the future to deliver technical capabilities that support a resilient, maintainable, scalable, and trustworthy product
• Ou'll work at the intersection of deep technical craft and business impact — partnering closely with product, data, design, and engineering leadership to shape what Homebase builds and how we build it
• These are the key ways you’ll contribute and create impact in this role:
• Technical Leadership: In collaboration with our Technical Leadership group of Staff and Principal Engineers, drive Homebase’s technical vision and architecture across our Core Product domains such as Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, and HRM — creating coherence across domains that today serve 100K+ SMBs
• API Strategy: Champion and help deliver Homebase's API strategy — building a platform that enables internal velocity, external integrations, and future partnership opportunities
• Service Architecture: Lead the decomposition of core product systems into well-bounded services using domain-driven design and SOA principles
• Technical Problem Solving: Identify and resolve cross-cutting technical challenges — data consistency, performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps — before they become customer problems
• Engineering Excellence: Support and champion the Engineering culture to scale Engineering Excellence in all teams. Drive standards and patterns that are adopted because they're good, not because they're mandated; mentor senior and staff engineers to raise the overall bar
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Product, Data, Design and Engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and ensure technical strategy aligns with business priorities
• AI-First Engineering: Experiment with and deploy/build harness capabilities to accelerate engineering workflows — from code generation to test automation — and coach teams on doing the same
• Aligned with our belief that the best use of AI accelerates quality of the codebase and quality products as well as delivery velocity
• Champion AI adoption across teams you influence — continually identifying where AI creates real leverage vs. noise
• Measure and share the impact of AI-enabled improvements on velocity, quality, or developer experience
• As a key member in Engineering Leadership, contribute to AI platform efforts that will enable Homebase to deliver outsized customer benefit through faster product development and higher quality features

The application process

• Meet the Talent Acquisition team, Mavel W
• Meet the Hiring Manager, Andrea C
• Participate in a Technical Interview
• Meet Cross-functional Partners in Product & Engineering
• Connect on Values & AI Mindset with Senior Engineers
• Background Check + Offer Stage
• Welcome to the team, Homie 🎉

Benefits

• Stock Options
• Paid parental leave
• Generous paid time off options
• Offsites, customer days & social events
• Work from Anywhere Month
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) matching program
• Pre-tax commuter benefits
• Snacks + lunch on us at hub offices
• MasterClass at Work for ongoing learning
• Group health benefits coverage
• Group RRSP with employer match + TFSA
• Snacks + lunch on us at hub offices
• MasterClass at Work for ongoing learning