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
Additional employee ratings
(these do not contribute to the FlexScore®)
Working at Prolific
Company employees
Gender diversity (male:female:non-binary)
Office locations
Funding levels
Hiring Countries