Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer

Who are you?

As our Principal Engineer, you'll be the visionary architect behind Xello's technological journey. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering you will be tasked with crafting our long-term tech strategy. Every decision will help ensure we remain transformative and leaders in our space.

Your unique blend of strategic foresight and hands‑on execution helps you show our teams how to navigate dynamic challenges with expertise and precision. Collaborating closely with senior leaders, your influence will be pivotal in raising the bar to the highest standards for code quality, architecture, and process.

Join us and champion Xello's transformative technical journey. Your expertise won’t just elevate our platform, it will profoundly impact the futures of students. You will help empower the next generation to plan and achieve their dreams.

Sound exciting to you? Read on!

What you’ll do…

• Define and evolve Xello’s long-term technical roadmap, aligning it with product and business strategy.
• Collaborate closely with the product, design, sales, and client‑facing teams to ensure technology decisions support user needs and company growth.
• Set technical direction across teams, guiding architecture toward scalable, secure, and maintainable systems.
• Partner with engineering leaders to lead the evolution of AI in the development lifecycle, establishing practical patterns, guardrails, and workflows that improve velocity, quality, and developer experience while managing risk appropriately.
• Identify and prioritize technical debt, balancing long‑term system health with ongoing product delivery.
• Champion continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes in partnership with our DevOps team, ensuring our software solutions are highly available, performant, and secure.
• Collaborate with QA to strengthen our quality strategy, emphasizing a proactive approach to reliability, security, and performance.
• Lead design reviews, planning sessions, and critical discussions, fostering an environment where all voices are heard and effective compromises are made.
• Help shape the development, alignment, and effectiveness of senior technical talent across the organization.
• Play an instrumental role in our hiring strategy, ensuring we attract and retain the industry's top talent.

What we’re looking for…

• A professional with 15+ years of software engineering experience, and at least 5 years at the staff or principal level in high‑growth SaaS businesses or startups.
• Demonstrated technical credibility in opinionated engineering environments, grounded in deep expertise in software development methodologies and best practices, with the ability to build trust through sound judgement, clear reasoning, and a strong track record of balancing quality, speed, and maintainability.
• Comprehensive expertise across our technical stack, including C#/.NET for backend development, TypeScript and Angular for modern single‑page applications, strong fluency in web standards and front‑end architecture, proficiency with SQL and Redis, and deep experience building and operating systems in Azure.
• Meaningful experience applying AI to engineering workflows, with sound judgement around tradeoffs, guardrails, and best practices, and a track record of using AI to reduce toil, improve quality, and increase team effectiveness.
• A bias toward simplicity and pragmatism, with a track record of reducing complexity while enabling scale, resilience, and accelerating velocity.
• Excellent conflict management and collaboration skills, with the ability to navigate disagreement respectfully, evaluate competing ideas fairly, and drive evidence‑based decisions.
• The ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Empathy and collaboration skills, especially when working with sales, product, and design teams.
• A commitment to staying up to date with the latest in technology, and the ability to assess its relevance to Xello’s objectives.

We are an inclusive, equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

For our Canadian based staff, we also offer:

• Flexible work arrangements including hybrid and remote
• 4 weeks of vacation
• Employer‑paid health and dental benefits
• 4‑month top‑up for parental leave
• Group RRSP with 3% matching

For our US based staff, we also offer:

• Remote work environment
• 4 weeks of vacation
• 80% employer‑paid health benefits
• 4‑month top‑up for parental leave
• 401(k) with 3% matching

For our UK based staff, we also offer:

• Remote work environment
• 28 days annual leave (inc. 3 days at Christmas) + bank holidays. With additional annual leave days added to reward long service