Principal Software Engineer, Collaborative Web Platform

Role overview

Provide hands-on technical leadership for a new collaborative web platform combining real-time editing, content management, governed publishing, developer experience, and AI-assisted workflows. You will shape architecture and engineering strategy across organizational boundaries while helping teams deliver a reliable, secure, accessible, and extensible production platform. The role is a high-impact individual-contributor position with broad influence and continued involvement in implementation.

Responsibilities

- Define the architectural direction for collaboration, branch-aware content, APIs, data models, visual editing, publishing, integrations, and extension points. - Establish clear boundaries among the collaborative platform, hosting infrastructure, and external systems, using explicit build-versus-buy and total-cost criteria. - Identify architectural risks, document tradeoffs, guide technical roadmaps, and create lightweight mechanisms for cross-team alignment. - Set practical standards for reliability, security, privacy, observability, API design, testing, deployment, incident response, and operational ownership. - Partner with engineering, product, design, security, infrastructure, support, and go-to-market leaders to turn company goals into sequenced technical investments. - Mentor senior engineers, strengthen hiring signals, participate in customer and partner discussions, and write or review critical code when it materially advances the work.

Requirements

- 14+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained technical impact. - Experience operating as a principal engineer, chief architect, or comparable technical leader across multiple teams and products. - Track record defining strategy for a complex product, platform, or distributed system from early architecture through production operation. - Strong systems thinking across frontend, backend, APIs, data, infrastructure, security, and operations. - Experience with distributed, event-driven, real-time, collaborative, or stateful systems. - Deep knowledge of production reliability, observability, incident response, safe delivery, API design, and technical-debt management.

Nice to have

- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS products requiring governance, security, availability, and customer isolation. - Experience leading a zero-to-one launch or major platform transformation. - Background in content management, developer platforms, visual editing, or AI-assisted workflows.

Benefits and work setup

- Vancouver, British Columbia in-office workspace. - Published Canadian base salary range: $175,950–$219,938 CAD annually. - Equity plan, paid time off, sick leave, company holidays, and medical, dental, and vision coverage. - Equipment support, monthly wellness and learning allowance, and team or company events. - Visa sponsorship is not available.