Principal Software Engineer

About Us The Company: Dotdigital is a thriving global community of passionate, dedicated professionals, committed to the collective success of the organization and its clients.

Our core principles of innovation, teamwork, and client-focused solutions drive us to approach challenges with a growth mindset and take ownership of our work.

At Dotdigital, collaboration and curiosity pave the way for meaningful connections and learning opportunities with diverse peers.

Our work environment encourages knowledge sharing, fosters exploration, and cherishes creative ideas.

Combined, these guide us towards a shared vision in which brands around the world exceed customer expectations through the adoption of responsible marketing practices.

The Product: Dotdigital is an all-in-one customer experience and data platform (CXDP) that empowers marketing teams to exceed customer expectations with highly personalized cross-channel journeys.

With Dotdigital, marketers can seamlessly unify, enrich, and segment customer data, breaking down data silos, streamlining decision-making, and paving the way for marketing creativity that delivers customer engagement at scale.

With powerful AI capabilities, Dotdigital makes it easy to automate deeply personalized experiences across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, push, social, ads, and more.

About the Role

Principal software engineers will have great knowledge of the current architecture of our software systems, which parts don't align with product requirements and what should be done to address this whilst balancing short and long-term technical objectives.

They should become the first port for discussion when other engineers need to make decisions around technical direction and should also be able to effectively rollout communication around any directional changes to development managers and team leads.

Key Responsibilities

1. Create and maintain goal-state architecture diagrams and regularly review our progress towards them.
2. Have regular catchups with Product to ensure these diagrams reflect the direction the business wants to travel in.
3. Make the big technical calls; after weighing up arguments, be responsible for making any major engineering decisions Dotdigital faces.
4. Modernize our software systems; define strong bounded contexts that promote clear engineering focus and component reuse.
5. Prioritize removing legacy technologies and improve our engineering practices.
6. Enable change by reducing system complexity and increasing testability.
7. Improve the developer experience throughout the development lifecycle.
8. Force multiplier - Help make all teams of engineers more productive; spend time working with different teams to improve them.
9. Help teams to be more efficient by learning to fail fast.
10. Ensure all major technical risks are surfaced to the business.
11. Champion writing high-level guidance on how to approach and solve problems.
12. Finish projects by identifying and working with teams that are struggling to get things over the line.
13. Work closely with the Platform Engineering Manager to ensure that Dotdigital's technical direction is clear to all functions across the business and aligns with our future product ambitions.
14. Keep current from a technology and domain perspective and where possible make sure Product Owners are aware of what will be possible in the future.
15. Learn from incidents, spot re-occurring problems and engage relevant teams to create a more stable platform.
16. Promote & grow the technical track of progression at Dotdigital to improve the health of our technical direction.

About You

Ability to work effectively in any of the technologies currently in use at the company from all the codebases to data storage and infrastructure.

Good domain knowledge of Dotdigital software systems.

Record of leading & delivering complex engineering projects successfully.

Excellent reviewer; record of finding issues (logical, scalable, security, etc) whilst reviewing architectural design and code.

Good verbal & written communication skills.

Strong understanding of performance, reliability, scalability and availability in large, distributed software systems.

Strong understanding of security & privacy.

Listener - Spend time listening to other technical people before suggesting your ideas.

Responsible / Accountable - Always want to prevent the same failure from happening more than once.

Leader - Support other technical people in the business; influence them, reinforce them, and help them succeed.

Pragmatist - Know how to deliver business value by balancing short and long-term objectives.

Innovator - Stay current with the progression of technology and put plans in place to take advantage of advancements.

Precise - Everything you do should be precise from code to reviews and communication.

Interview Process

1. 15min Screening Call with Team Talent
2. 30min Interview with the Platform Engineering Manager
3. 1-hour interview with Principal Software Engineer and Platform Engineering Director
4. 1-hour final interview with the Platform Team

Some of Our Global Benefits

1. Parental leave
2. Medical benefits
3. Paid sick leave
4. Dotdigital day
5. Share reward
6. Wellbeing reward
7. Wellbeing Days
8. Loyalty reward

DEI Commitment

As an equal opportunities employer we are committed to equality in all its practices with regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

If you have any additional requirements or adjustments to assist an application then please don't hesitate to contact us and advise us how we can best support you.

Legal Statement

No agencies / recruiters please. We are only accepting applications directly from the applicants. If you are a recruiter, please refrain from reaching out to our staff about this position. Anything contrary will be treated as unsolicited approach under the applicable data protection law.