Principal Software Engineer

Engineering

Remote, United States

Now is the time to join us! 

At Virgin Pulse we value and celebrate diversity and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe in creating teams made up of individuals with various backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Why? Because diversity inspires innovation, collaboration, and challenges us to produce better solutions. But more than this, diversity is our strength, and a catalyst in our ability to #changelivesforgood.   

Who are you?

Principal Software Engineers are the experts in the field, uses professional concepts in developing resolution to critical issues and broad design matters. They have proven track record of excellence across the company and are "Development Expert" to delivery stream. They are responsible for driving the direction of their part of the organization, assisting management and other senior technical leaders create strategic roadmaps and driving priorities to meet various objectives.

Principal Engineers have a good understanding of the entire business, and a thorough understanding of several domains how they contribute to overall business strategy. They lead strategic organizational decisions and plans, and actively seek to create or redefine roadmaps across the organization with product, business, and architecture counterparts. Usually involved in strategic organizational decisions and plans. Leads stream-level strategic efforts and influencing decisions to achieve cross-team alignment on goals.

They help refine roadmaps across the stream based on technical strategy and constraints. Helps defining new product abilities utilizing technical strategy and platform capabilities.

In this role you will wear many hats, but your knowledge will be essential in the following:  

• Develops proven systems. Replicates those systems and approaches across the team so that others may learn from and improve on them.
• Play a central role in technical, business, and organizational contributions affecting the sub-department (delivery stream).
• Closely collaborates with architecture team and advocates for best practices in delivery stream
• Not only leads but ideates new engineering efforts. Provides guidance and vision.
• Mentors and actively drives the technical skills of the immediate or extended team with consideration of their career stage and personal trajectory.
• Removes barriers by working with others around a shared need or customer benefit.
• Creates strategies that cross organizational boundaries to achieve broad business goals or influence.
• Anticipates issues or implications that their ideas would have on others and pursues mutually beneficial strategies.
• Beyond participating in meetings, thoughtfully creates and leads meetings when helpful.
• Sets clear and challenging goals for a portfolio of work and pursues them with enthusiasm and passion. Understands business objectives and incorporates these into this body of work. Critically reviews multiple plans and adjusts as needed.
• Drives measurable growth by scaling/mentoring teams, affecting engineering roadmaps positively, managing key metrics, creating research and/or programs.
• Partners with other teams to improve the effectiveness of our internal tooling.
• Interfaces with EMs and Senior management and enables Lead and Sr. Lead Engineers to engage on department-level aspects of larger initiatives.
• Looks for innovation opportunities between several teams with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope.
• Proposes initial technical implementation which supports architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.
• Ensures that goals are aligned across several teams in their delivery stream.
• Guides conversations to remove blockers and encourage collaboration across teams.
• Provides a point of escalation for sub-department (Deliver Stream) teams facing complex technical challenges.
• Attain a measurable impact on the work of sub-department teams.
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your sub-department.
• Exposes the work of the sub department and their business impact internally.

You’ll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

What you bring to the Virgin Pulse team

In order to represent the best of what we have to offer you come to us with a multitude of positive attributes including:

• 7+ years of hands-on development as a professional
• Expertise in multiple of the following languages: Ruby, Javascript, Java, Kotlin, Node.js, React, and Python
• Strong SQL experience with PosgreSQL
• Strong Elasticsearch experience
• Experience with centralized logging and metrics collection systems
• Experience with technical innovation in software architecture and building innovative solutions
• Ability to present and defend technical proposals in front of audiences of varying size
• Working knowledge of API fundamentals and best practices implementing microservices
• Cloud experience with AWS
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins or similar tools
• Experience with a Scrum and Agile based environment
• Experience with cross application integration and troubleshooting.
• You will lead complex technical projects that interact between multiple system components. (Performance Tuning, Security Analysis, Integrations)
• This role may require access to systems containing Regulated or Confidential data and is thereby subject to additional security and privacy controls

You also take pride in offering the following Core Skills, Competencies, and Characteristics:

• Being a positive driving force for the team
• Being a self-starter, high energy, and willing to go the extra mile
• You are an amazing communicator (written and verbal) and comfortable discussing software and features.
• You are comfortable communicating with remote individuals and offices and working in a team environment.
• You have a logical working style with keen attention to detail.
• Your ability to contribute to a planning or scheduling discussion mirrors your ability to listen and learn from your peers.
• Bring a passion to stay on top of tech trends, experiment with and learn new technologies.

No candidate will meet every single desired qualification. If your experience looks a little different from what we’ve identified and you think you can bring value to the role, we’d love to learn more about you!

Our technology sets us apart

Our cloud platform is using an exciting mixture of technologies to provide millions of end users with rich experiences in native mobile and responsive browser platforms built in ReactJS at scale. These highly scalable, reliable applications are supported by a suite of services built on APIs and real-time processors leveraging Spring Framework technologies. Our platforms consume billions of activities, in various forms, which drive our analytics and machine learning platforms. We leverage backend systems, with AWS at their core, which support a diverse set of workloads including PostgreSQL RDS, ElastiCache, Elasticsearch, SNS/SQS, Kafka, EC2/ECS/EKS, S3, CloudFront, and Personalize. We manage these services with infrastructure as code technologies to ensure consistency and reliability.

Continuous Integration and Deployment is part of our DNA. We structure our applications as microservices and manage each deployment pipeline using containers, GitLab, and Harness. We strive for layered approach to unit, integration, functional tests to allow for lower risk releases at rates 100s of times per day to multiple environments.

You’ll be working on a platform that serves:

• Several million users with nearly 50% use daily
• 75 billion API calls and transactions a year spread across 35 services
• An engaging native mobile platform driving 85% of user traffic
• Hundreds of terabytes of data spread across multiple transactional and analytical stores

Engineers at Virgin Pulse work in small autonomous teams of technical leads, product owners, project managers, designers, and engineers collaborating with each other, across teams, to deliver unique solutions and products to the portfolio. As part of our team, you bring to the table your technical and leadership skills to help us build the latest technology in health and wellness platforms.

Security Competencies:

Work to ensure system and data security is maintained at a high standard, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the Virgin Pulse application is not compromised. Ensure industry best practice coding standards are adhered to ensure all code developed at Virgin Pulse is free from bugs and security vulnerabilities, such as those defined and published by OWASP.

Why work at Virgin Pulse??? 

We believe a career should provide competitive pay and benefits, a collaborative and supportive culture and cutting-edge technology and services. Virgin Pulse is an equal opportunity organization and is committed to diversity, inclusion, equity and social justice. To that end, we make a particular effort to recruit candidates from minoritized backgrounds to apply for open positions.

In compliance with all states and cities that require transparency of pay, the base compensation for this position ranges from $160,000 to $175,000 annually. Note that salary may vary based on location, skills, and experience. This position is eligible for 10% target bonus/variable compensation as well as health, dental, vision, mental health and other benefits.