Principal Engineer

Full Time
Melbourne VIC, Australia
5 months ago

Join us on our mission to make a better world of work. 

Culture Amp revolutionizes how over 25 million employees across 6,000 companies create a better world of work. As the global platform leader for employee experience, Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, develop high performing teams, and retain talent via cutting-edge research, powerful technology, and the largest employee dataset in the world. The most innovative companies across the globe, such as Salesforce, PwC, KIND, SoulCycle, Celonis and BigCommerce depend on Culture Amp every day.

Culture Amp is backed by 10 years of innovation, leading capital venture funds, and offices in the U.S, U.K, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp is recognized as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and one of the most innovative workplace companies by Fast Company.

Learn more about how Culture Amp can help you create a better world of work at cultureamp.com.

The Opportunity at Culture Amp

Culture Amp is on an exciting journey of growth that involves embracing a distributed architecture and scaling our Engineering group. To help us do this in an effective, efficient, and high-quality way, we are seeking a Principal Engineer to join our team.

There are three key areas of impact/focus for this role; technical expertise, strategic impact and leadership.

Technical expertise: This is the most senior technical advisor to the Director of Engineering, who will rely on you to guide, coach, and make significant technical decisions and contributions across many Tech Leads, teams, projects and systems. 

You will be an important influencer and contributor to core projects as well as new experimental work, helping all teams move forward with our technical vision.

When presented with a complex problem, process, or existing system, you can reduce its complexity and optimize it to meet key quality attributes. Most of all, you are known to bring a high level of expertise that lifts everyone around you, while having the ability to move across many different systems and contexts with ease.

Strategic impact: The Principal Engineer is expected to take the 3-5 year business vision & product strategy to come up with a feasible technology roadmap for their camp. Working closely with the Director of Engineering, and taking direction and feedback from other engineering leaders including the VPs of Engineering, the Principal Engineer will think strategically in how teams move towards the Tech Vision while still delivering value that meets our customers needs.

Leadership: Influencing and inspiring other engineers and Tech Leads will be paramount in the success of this role. You will facilitate cross-team work and influence different areas of the business beyond any single team or group. You will use your coaching expertise to drive groups of disparate interests to decisions, seeing these through to impact. You will be able to help make pragmatic decisions, balancing strategic and tactical needs. You will help camp leadership manage engineering risk and make sure we are making the right trade off calls that deliver a constant stream of value to our customers while building a sustainable system. 

Key responsibilities

  • Answerable and across all the technical decisions made by Tech-Leads and teams within your camp, ensuring that they balance the numerous demands to produce the best outcomes for Culture Amp. 
  • To guide and streamline the building of high quality software, while regularly delivering value to our customers.
  • Along with the Director of Engineering, you are responsible for onboarding, training and growing Tech Leads and engineers in your camp.
  • Collaborating with other Practice Leads, Directors & VPs of Engineering, and Tech Leads to produce high quality technical outcomes for Culture Amp that are consistent with our Tech Vision and other practice initiatives.

Key outcomes

  • Technical Excellence - Drive technical “leading practice” in line with the Tech Vision to meet Culture Amp’s needs.
  • Camp Health - Ensure Tech Leads and all engineering in your camp are happy, productive, enjoy their work, have clear remits, and help then to resolve issues to improve culture and engagement to maximize their impact on our mission
  • Delivery - Put in place metrics that drive the correct prioritization of activities in your camp that deliver the most value to Culture Amp.
  • Communication - Ensure a steady flow of consistent communication within and across all of our Camps. Facilitate knowledge-sharing, plan visibility and alignment of large initiatives between the Camps and the VP of Engineering.
  • Mentor (optional) - Mentor of Tech Leads and the engineers in your camp, to support their needs and development, and to drive consistent and technical excellence.

What You Bring to Our Camp

  • Experience - You have significant experience working as an engineer on complex systems, with a track record of producing high quality systems that work together.
  • Strategic Technical Leader - You are able to chart a path on a long term journey through much complexity, change and ambiguity.
  • Clear Communicator - You are able to clearly communicate a compelling plan and the reasoning behind your decisions, ensuring campers with varying degrees of experience and context can understand your message and approach.
  • Strong facilitation and stakeholder management - You make clear and timely decisions in the face of many nuanced trade offs and varied opinions. 
  • A natural coach and teacher - You always make time to coach and teach all those around you. This includes engineers in your camp, your peers and those you report to.
  • A Driver - You get things done and you like to roll up your sleeves and get to work, pushing a number of initiatives forward simultaneously.

Please keep reading...

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalized folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit. 

We believe that inclusive businesses are better, not just for “company results”, but for the world. We have a strong commitment to Anti-Racism, and endeavor to lead by example. Every step we make as a business towards anti-racism is another step we can take to support our customers in making a better world (of work). You can see our current commitments to Anti-Racism here.

We ensure you have the tools you need to thrive both in and out of work.

  • MacBooks for you to do your best work 
  • Share Options - it’s important to us that everyone is an owner and can share in our success
  • Excellent parental leave and in work support programme, - for those families to be
  • Flexible working schedule - where we can, let’s make work, work for you
  • Fun and inclusive digital, and in-person events

Most importantly, an opportunity to really make a difference in people’s lives.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this advert. If you decide to apply, as part of your application, we will ask you to complete voluntary diversity questions (excluding Germany). Please watch this video from our amazing DEI Leader, Aubrey Blanche to share more on why we collect the data and how we will use it.