Canada onlyThinkific is a learning commerce platform that helps learning businesses turn knowledge into impact. By bringing together community, courses, and content with commerce, we power transformative learning experiences that help businesses grow their revenue—and reach millions of learners around the world.
We’re a team of 300+ Thinkers building products that matter. Every role at Thinkific contributes to raising the bar for online learning, supporting learning businesses, and creating real-world impact. You’ll work alongside curious, collaborative teammates who care deeply about what they build and who they build it for.
We’re committed to a fair, inclusive, and human hiring experience. Our team is here to guide you every step of the way, so you always know what to expect!
Do you have in-depth experience leading technical initiatives and aligning engineering strategy with business outcomes, and are you ready to apply that expertise at scale within a growing, product-led company? We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer, End-to-End Solution to join us at Thinkific.
As a Principal Software Engineer at Thinkific, you’ll act as a force multiplier, elevating our engineering team by aligning diverse perspectives across all teams and business lines into a cohesive technical strategy. You’ll bridge business and technology, owning end-to-end system architecture and influencing developer productivity tools alongside platform and infrastructure needs. Your work will ensure that our systems evolve sustainably, balancing performance, reliability, and cost efficiency to deliver value for our customers and our business. Reporting to our Director, Platform Engineering, you’ll collaborate closely with R&D leadership, including fellow Principal Engineers, and work cross-functionally with teams across Thinkific to make that vision a reality.
Your goal will be to drive the technical evolution of Thinkific’s end-to-end systems to enable scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient product growth. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:
- Own the strategic evolution of the product from a technical perspective — your objective is to ensure business success and impact through technical decisions and implementations
- Own overall architecture and technical vision for the product
- Partner with the R&D Leadership to stay updated on business strategy and pair with them on ownership of the domains, the principals from the technical perspective and the directors from the strategic & organizational perspective
- Collaborate closely with R&D leadership at all levels (including fellow Principal Engineers), leveraging your expertise to co-develop the technical roadmap and transform strategic opportunities into manageable engineering tasks
- Partner with Platform Engineering, SRE and Security teams to define standards for infrastructure, reliability and cost efficiency to ensure sustainable system growth
- Lead by example and grow the technical excellence of our teams, providing strategic guidance and oversight to Senior, Staff and other Principal engineers. Collaborate on prioritization of work, implementation details, technical stack decisions, and overall health of systems and features, ensuring alignment with higher-level technical strategy and guiding principles
- Oversee the end-to-end architecture of our systems, from developer workflows, build systems and tooling through production infrastructure, ensuring stability, scalability and security across the stack
- Be responsible for writing and reviewing technical documentation across business and technical domains, and sponsor other engineers to maintain, add, and update as well
- Review technical proposals for other engineers and help them level up by mentoring them and helping them solve complex problems
- Own SaaS metrics relating to Thinkific systems (like COGs), and be accountable for the overall costs, reliability, and scalability of the domains in relation to business value
- Maintain visibility outside of the organization, regularly contributing to the engineering blog, giving talks at conferences, and overall influencing engineering culture inside & outside the organization
- Play an active role in our hiring process to help us continue to scale our Engineering team, from suggesting skills gaps, to interviewing candidates, to conducting assignment reviews
- Participate in on-call rotations as required, troubleshooting production issues to maintain the reliability of our products and rapidly addressing critical production issues
- Regularly engage with customers, technology vendors, and the broader community, proactively maintaining up-to-date knowledge to position Thinkific effectively in the rapidly evolving AI landscape
The person we have in mind likely:
- Has 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of experience in a senior technical leadership role (Principal or Staff level)
- Has experience working in a Principal Engineer or Architect role
- Has proven ability in architecting and delivering cloud-native solutions at scale, as well as rapidly prototyping ideas to validate new opportunities quickly
- Has demonstrated strategic architectural ownership, defining high-level technical vision and standards using a shared code and infrastructure model, while delegating detailed implementation to Staff Engineers
- Has a track record of translating strategic business goals into actionable engineering roadmaps, aligning technical solutions with clear business outcomes
- Has expert-level knowledge of relational and non-relational database technologies such as PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and DynamoDB
- Has strong customer and stakeholder empathy, actively engaging users to deeply understand their experiences, needs, and concerns
- Takes a hands-on approach to continuous learning and knowledge-sharing, regularly researching trends, competitor technologies, and effectively communicating insights internally and externally
- Has clear, collaborative communication skills, able to influence senior leadership, mentor engineers, and build an engineering culture centred around responsible, innovative solutions
- Loves to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business
These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:
- Experience with modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tooling, including large language models, fine-tuning techniques, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, and AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf)
- Expert-level knowledge of one or more web frameworks
- Business analysis and requirements gathering experience
- Experience conducting technical product research or analyzing competitor technologies
- Experience with backend languages such as Ruby, Go (Golang), or Node.js, or frontend technologies such as React, TypeScript, GraphQL, HTML, and CSS
We’re committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you are and where you can grow to. This role has a salary range of $180,500 - $225,600 - $270,700 CAD in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.
For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility
This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.
We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.
What you can expect if you join Thinkific:
👏 An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing, award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures by Waterstone!
🚀 The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact for thousands of businesses and millions of students around the world.
💸 A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team-wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
🌴Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season.
🩺 Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short-term health plan, and an additional $900/year health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options.
🤝 3 Paid Volunteer Days each year to give back to your community and support the causes you care about.
💻 Flexible Work. Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
⬆️ Learning & Growth. An annual $2,000 CAD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
🏡 A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
💙 A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can't wait to meet you!
The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh(Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.
