Principal Software Engineer

About The Role

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help us accelerate scaling our platform engineering team.

As Principal Engineer, you will lead out with agentic engineering, architectural leadership across our platform, and assist in evolving our engineering practices for our global remote team.

You will have significant experience in most of these areas:

• Agentic Engineering practices increasing output and quality of code
• Working as a partner with product and design to plan features that are architecturally sound
• Working productively with remote engineers in the US and around the world
• Highly scalable and lightning fast enterprise SaaS system architectures
• Building world class user experiences
• Enterprise UI architecture for components, themes, and coding patterns
• Asynchronous queues & streams, patterns & technologies, and when to use them
• Monorepo strategies, micro services, domain driven design, and other patterns that help enterprise teams collaborate on large projects and platforms
• Highly scalable, versionable, and fast APIs, including Rest and GraphQL styles
• Data systems including transactional, SQL, NoSQL, performance caching, and reporting
• Mentoring other engineers of all levels

This role is a hybrid of remote and some in office work days.

Who are we?

Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted. We are poised for high growth.

Our Culture

As a company, we are guided by our cultural values:

• Iterate to evolve
• Cultivate openness
• Act with accountability
• Assume the best
• Practice humility
• Deliver amazing experiences
• Drive outcomes

At Kuali, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN!

We’ve embraced distributed work for years—it’s part of who we are. Many of our employees work remotely across the U.S., from Massachusetts to Seattle, while others collaborate in person at our office locations. We’re intentional about creating a healthy, connected culture no matter where you work.

Requirements

As a Principal Software Engineer you will work across our suite of products and engineering group. Kuali builds SaaS web applications for colleges and universities. We help higher-ed institutions manage finances, administer research projects and serve students.

At Kuali, we believe development, security and operations (DevSecOps) are fundamentally intertwined and best managed by one collaborative, vertical team. Our engineering teams share responsibility for their products and services top to bottom. That means they write code and automated tests, review pull requests, build and manage continuous delivery pipelines to AWS infrastructure and other cloud services to run their code and they monitor how those services are functioning. It also means they take their regular turn at being on-call should anything go wrong. Code is not our product. Our product is well-run services that are useful, delightful, fast, secure and reliable.

We take pride in our products and their ability to meet the needs of our customers and our company. We believe we ultimately go faster when we take the time to do things right the first time. We don’t rush our work. We invest heavily in automated testing and quality up front. We work to keep tech debt to a minimum.

We work in a variety of technologies to varying degrees. Node.js, React, Elixir, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, and others. Our teams use Continuous Delivery to deliver software. While we may not be enthusiastic about the dogma and ceremony that have become part of many agile approaches, we are still big fans of the original Agile Manifesto, especially the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. We work in the best ways to suit our needed product & engineering outcomes.

We want our people to work a prioritized, focused 32-hour 4-day work week. In our development teams we strive to establish a sustainable pace of delivering high-quality software. We avoid deadlines and anything like death marches. We consider free dinner at work an anti-pattern.

Expectations

• As a Principal Software Engineer, we expect the following:
• You are an expert & highly experienced software engineer well-versed in many languages and are excited about working in React, Node.js and Elixir.
• Everyone knows that when you take on a task whether it’s huge and scary or tiny and boring, you’re going to see it through to the best of your ability.
• It’s obvious to everyone around you that you have fun with your work and with your co-workers.
• You care about how your work and attitude affects those around you. We mean really care. If you hurt someone, it hurts you. Everything you do runs through this filter.
• You understand that communication is the biggest responsibility of your job as an engineer and the one you’re least likely to get right unless you focus on it.
• You focus on shipping software and running services that matter to your customers, your users and your company.
• You know that your team’s time is just as valuable as yours and can tell the difference between valuable meetings and dogmatic ceremony.
• You are humble enough to bend to the will of the frameworks, technologies, constraints, and people you work with when doing so won’t have a materially negative impact. In other words, you can play by someone else’s rules when that’s the easiest and/or best thing to do.
• You make pragmatic (often boring) technology choices at work and you play in your free time (or whenever it’s appropriate). You don’t build science projects just because you are smart enough to build them.
• You don’t feel the need to prove to anyone what a great engineer you are, and therefore...
• You don’t mind being the one that looks bad when you deserve it. You make mistakes sometimes, because you’re human, but rather than dwell on them you choose to fix and then learn from them.
• You love to teach and learn from your co-workers.

_We thank Chad Fowler for this most wonderful list.

_Perks

• The opportunity to work to together with smart, passionate people to build a high growth, highly profitable SaaS company
• A truly exceptional benefits package, including 100% company-paid medical and dental insurance
• 100% 401(k) matching up to 4%
• Paid Maternity/Parental leave
• Flexible PTO — no accrual limits, no ‘use it or lose it.’ Just work with your manager to make sure the team’s covered, and take the time you need to recharge.
• Encouragement and support for ongoing learning and skill development
• Recognition platform to celebrate contributions with meaningful incentives
• Company retreats to connect, recharge, and collaborate

Kuali has been voted a top place to work for 9 years by the Salt Lake Tribune. In 2024 TIME Magazine honored us by naming Kuali to their list of the World’s Top EdTech Companies , ranking us #99 overall and #37 in the US.

At Kuali, we value and respect individuals from all backgrounds, recognizing that a rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives fuels our success as a company and enriches our collective human experience.