Principal Engineer

SPAN Digital is a growing premium software product and consulting services company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional development offices in Cape Town, South Africa, and Guadalajara, Mexico. We have experience in a broad range of industries but are keenly focused on the technology, entertainment, and healthcare sectors. We strategize, design, and develop software solutions for our clients and customers from startups to global brands. We help engineering teams successfully overcome the challenges caused by the accelerating pace of change in software development, allowing them to build better digital solutions.

Our Services Teams work side-by-side with our client's engineering teams to develop prototypes, proof-of-concepts, production services, and major product enhancements.

Our Product Teams leverage our unique vantage point to develop category-defining products that enable our customers' teams to significantly outperform the competition.

We are currently looking for a Principal Engineer, based in Cape Town, to join our engineering discipline and play a key leadership role in building our capabilities. In addition, this role will be responsible for the technical leadership of one or more of our premier client engagements and drive the successful execution of our software development projects.

Role And Responsibilities

As a Principal Engineer at SPAN, your role encompasses a high level of autonomy, influence, and complexity in your work. You would be expected to work under broad direction, often initiating and leading activities. Your responsibilities would include analyzing, designing, planning, executing, and evaluating work to time, cost, and quality targets. You would establish milestones and play a significant role in the assignment of tasks and responsibilities.

Initially leading the definition of goals and objectives for each initiative, then leading the definition of the solution that will deliver the required results. Principal Engineers are responsible for ensuring we deliver business outcomes within budget while maintaining and improving quality. Principal Engineers are all-round, problem solvers, who love to engage clients and other engineers.

Scope of Responsibility

Principal Engineers can integrate lessons learned and experience gained from their many years of practice into the problems they solve every day. They can apply their experience appropriately in a broad set of situations. They are seasoned professionals capable of scoping and designing entire systems. They are able to perform well continuously over an extended period of time and show improvement. They are expected to be able to tackle complex technical problems, troubleshoot issues, and propose effective solutions. This may involve analyzing system performance, diagnosing bugs, or resolving production incidents.

Growing Engineers and the Engineering Discipline

Principal Engineers are responsible for mentoring engineering staff and providing on the job training. They are expected to contribute to and drive the development of the engineering community at SPAN.

Engaging Stakeholders

Principal Engineers are experienced at engaging clients and customers. They are able to lead the scoping and design discussions and arrive at satisfactory solutions. Principals are able to explain risks and trade-offs and act as a trusted advisor to clients and customers. They collaborate with other teams such as product management, design, and operations to ensure alignment and successful delivery of projects. Effective communication skills are crucial for conveying technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Technical Mastery

Principal Engineers have experience in all aspects of the product development lifecycle, from inception through design, development, testing, deployment, and support. They can demonstrate working knowledge of a broad range of technical areas and deep expertise in a few. They have excellent problem analysis and solving skills with the ability to innovate and abstract detail into larger patterns and systems. They are responsible for designing and architecting complex systems or components. This involves understanding requirements, considering scalability, performance, security, and other factors, and creating solutions that meet these needs. They may conduct research and experiments to evaluate new tools or approaches that could benefit the organization.

Leadership

Principal Engineers provide leadership by taking responsibility for the technical aspects of major projects or products. They are responsible for overseeing the tasks of our engineers. This oversight involves planning, architecture and design, estimation, resource management, issue resolution and quality assurance.

Tolerance of Continuous change

Principal Engineers thrive in an environment characterized by its fast pace and its high level of collaboration. Principal engineers are typically assigned to multiple projects, and are constantly thinking of the business, and looking for new opportunities within the accounts they look after. They are often responsible for driving continuous improvement initiatives within the engineering organization. This may involve identifying areas for optimization, implementing process improvements, and fostering a culture of innovation and learning. It is required of the Principal Engineer to work remotely with developers in different organizations, as such, adapting to different methodologies and technologies is essential.

Technologies
Our full-stack polyglots are experienced in a combination of:

• TypeScript, NodeJs, ReactJs, and additional mainstream JS frameworks
• Python, Go, Java, Scala, C#
• PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis
• Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, and whatever else is required to satisfy our customers

Typical Activities

• Facilitate and lead solution and system architecture and design sessions
• Help our clients define their needs, goals and objectives
• Factor an understanding of our clients and customers needs into our solutions
• Become a strategic advisor to clients and customers
• Foster a trusting and collaborative relationships with our clients and customers
• Work with design and other disciplines to achieve the broad business goals
• Define development best practices and ensure they are followed
• Solve the hardest technical problems or find someone who can.
• Maintain and grow our culture
• Contribute to the development of the engineering discipline
• Remove technology blockers from the team
• Identify cases of bottlenecks and make changes to fix them
• Mentor engineering staff and help them execute their growth plans
• Create effective teams that maximise abilities, growth, collaboration and innovation
• 1:1s with tech team members
• Resolve conflicts in the team
• Attend and contribute in external technical forums

You'll love it here if:

• You are allergic to hierarchical, bureaucratic, business-card cultures
• You're sad many of the greatest minds in our generation are busy tricking people into clicking on ads
• You want to work with very smart people from different backgrounds
• You are a voracious learner & an eager teacher of others
• You want to be led from the front, not commanded from the rear
• You don't tolerate intra-office posturing or other douchebaggery
• You're excited to work on a broader array of interesting, challenging projects than you can anywhere else

What we offer:

• Flexible and generous work & leave schedule
• Hybrid-remote working model (the best of both worlds)
• Learning organization based on a reverence for expertise & craftsmanship (Meetups, Conferences, Lunch & Learning Fridays, TechRadar Sessions, journals, e-Learning)
• Friday catered lunches, on-site haircuts, pet-friendly workplace, ping pong (a home away from home)
• Charitable community initiatives, employee awards, and recognition
• MacBook Pro and home office allowance (to ensure you have all the tools you need and want to make you effective)