Flexa
Prolific • Remote, UK

Principal Engineer

Remote-first

Fully flexible hours

Dog friendly

Job Description

At a Glance

Us: Fast growing startup of 90+ people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. YC alumni (summer 2019). Our mission is to revolutionise how the world learns about people, so people can revolutionise the world.🚀

The Role

The role of Principal Engineer is to enable change at an organisation level.

It still involves hands-on coding, but the main focus is to be a 'value-multiplier', using your experience and influence to create consistency, define technical approaches, and act as a support network for engineers. We are looking for someone who can directly contribute to Prolific’s success by advancing our engineering ability.

The Principal Engineer role is not part of a specific team, but instead moves between teams as an enabling and supportive capability, stopping things from falling between the cracks and looking for opportunities to make improvements that benefit Prolific at scale.

This is a bridging role, with expectations that you’ll look for what’s impacting flow across different teams, build good relationships as a respected and respectful engineering leader and ultimately be someone people can come to for help.

This role doesn’t have line-management responsibilities, but there will be times when you need to mentor, coach and support the development of engineers in a technical capacity.

In order to move us towards better practices, you’ll focus and lead on cross-cutting initiatives such as :

  • Up-skilling the organisation on Observability practices, how do we get the most out of Datadog? How can we treat testing in production like field testing, and answer the question of ‘Is what we think happening as a business actually happening?’
  • How can you help foster a culture of ‘you build it, you own it’?
  • Helping to converge different approaches across our teams into a target architecture that broadly aligns to our strategy, and being able to take what this target architecture looks like at an high level and communicate and work with engineers within teams to understand their capabilities and the path forward.

What you'll be doing

  • Guiding our approach to Event-Driven Architecture and serverless
  • Act as an advocate for the engineering team, both internally and externally
  • Coaching teams on modern engineering practices such as CI/CD, TDD and trunk-based development
  • Leading company wide engineering initiatives to help improve our processes and knowledge
  • Building exemplars that codify the technical blueprint we want to follow
  • You will champion our principles, be a community of practice member and help improve our engineering culture

What you’ll bring

  • Using agile software development practices and a product mindset, you will work across teams to plan, build and support software that our customers love and supports progress towards our OKRs
  • Commercial experience building software using Vue.js, Python, TypeScript or similar
  • A deep understanding of how to build well-architected services in AWS using serverless products and Event-Driven Architecture
  • The ability to facilitate, organise and coordinate initiatives and working groups
  • Demonstrable experience in supporting production systems with shift right testing and tools such as Datadog
  • Be able to push boundaries, questioning the status quo, ensuring what we are doing and what we are building is the very best it can be

What you’ll get

⚖️ Work-Life Balance: We’re all looking to strike the right work-life balance, and as a remote-first company you’re able to work flexibly from home or our dog-friendly co-working space in Shoreditch. We offer 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays of course, which you can switch with any day of your choosing. We also have adjusted hours where the whole company finishes 2 hours earlier on Fridays.

🏡 Family Life: We offer generous maternity, paternity and shared parental leave. Need to pick your child up from school? No Problem. Our flexible working gives you the childcare flexibility you need.

💰 Pension: We offer a salary sacrifice pension with a 3% starting employer contribution.

📈 Share Options: An exciting option to buy shares of Prolific in the future.

🧘 Wellbeing: We care deeply about our employees well-being, that’s why we offer comprehensive Bupa private health insurance, that disregards medical history. Taxable monthly stipend of £150 in order for you to improve your wellness and remote experience. We want you to have a happy and healthy environment so we offer a £1000 home office budget, along with a Apple MacBook Pro when you start, plus a £200 yearly top-up.

📚 Learn & Grow: Development is important to us, and we want to give all our employees the opportunity to learn. There are many personal growth and career progression opportunities available, as well as mentoring. We also offer a £1000 yearly budget for education, growth and training for you to use at your discretion.

💙 Culture: We’re a friendly bunch here at Prolific; open, transparent and inclusive. Although we’re a remote first company we still love to hang out with each other! We run collaborative quarterly company-wide meets up and team socials (both virtually and in-person), all paid for. Alongside this we offer a £1000 yearly budget for discretionary meet-ups so you can cover travel, food and accommodation. As a business we’re also committed to carbon offsetting; each month we donate money in your name to plant trees 🌳 and being remote we’re doing our bit to offset travel too

Our Interview Process

Talent Call: You'll meet with one of our Talent team and have an exploratory call about the role requirements, life at Prolific, as well as your background and aspirations.

Hiring Manager Interview: You'll interview with two members of the team, one of which will be the hiring manager. You'll have the opportunity to ask about the company and the role, and we'll ask you questions about your experiences and goals. Panel Interview: We'll hold a panel interview that evaluates skills required for the role. You'll meet with more of our team and may be asked to complete a presentation or task. You'll be compensated with a £50 voucher 💰 for completing the task because we know your time is valuable! Final Interview: We will deep dive into your past experiences, goals, motivations, and skills all aligned to our Prolific Principles. You'll speak with two to three members of the team and - as always - have an opportunity to ask questions about the role and company.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Monitoring

Prolific is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. We welcome all applications, and consider them without regard to race, religion, belief, age, gender, gender expression, gender identity, gender reassignment, disability, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, sex or sexual orientation.

We are committed to ensuring a fair recruitment process, it's essential to our success. Under the Equality Act (2010) we collect information from individuals at the point of application. We anonymously monitor the profiles of individuals that apply to each vacancy to ensure that no individual is unfairly discriminated against or disadvantaged.

Privacy Statement

By submitting your application, you agree that Prolific may collect your personal data for recruiting and global organisation planning. Prolific's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Prolific may process, where Prolific may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Prolific’s use of your personal information.

Company benefits

Bank holiday swaps
Company wide holidays/offsites
Early finish Fridays
Enhanced maternity leave – 13 weeks full paid, 26 weeks 50% pay
Enhanced paternity leave – 4 weeks full paid
Enhanced sick pay
Mental health days
L&D budget – £1000 per year
Work from home stipend
Dog friendly co-working space
25 days annual leave + bank holidays
Pregnancy loss leave
Open to part-time employees
Health insurance – Bupa & Medicash Health Plan (Opt in)
Life insurance
Lunch and learns
Employee discounts
Employee assistance programme
Optional unpaid leave
Pension match/increase
Salary sacrifice
£1000 yearly budget for education, growth, and training.
Taxable Stipend of £150 a month per person, £1800 a year (before tax).
Location
96%
Employees are very happy with their working location freedom
Hours
83%
Employees are very happy with the flexibility in the hours they work
Benefits
86%
Employees are very happy with the benefits their company offers
Work-life balance
78%
Employees feel that they can switch off quite easily from work
Role modelling
86%
Employees feel that flexible working is part of the culture
Autonomy
81%
Employees feel they have complete autonomy over getting their work done

Additional employee ratings
(these do not contribute to the FlexScore®)

Diversity
82%
Employees feel that the diversity, and the efforts to improve and maintain it, are great
Inclusion
81%
Employees feel like the company culture is brilliantly inclusive and equitable
Culture
81%
Employees feel like it is a really great environment to work in
Mission
87%
Employees feel very excited about and aligned with the company mission
Salary
76%
Employees feel that their salary is good and matches the value they bring

Working at Prolific

Company employees

109

Gender diversity (male:female:non-binary)

32:38:1

Office locations

London

Funding levels

$32,000,000

Hiring Countries

United Kingdom
United States

Awards & Achievements

Most flexible companies

Most flexible companies

Flexa100 2024
1st – DeepTech, Data & AI

1st – DeepTech, Data & AI

Industry awards 2023
3rd

3rd

Flexa100 2023
1st – Research & Data

1st – Research & Data

Industry awards 2022