Defines and evolves the long-term technical roadmap, sets architecture and engineering standards, guides AI adoption in development workflows, prioritizes technical debt, strengthens CI/CD and quality practices, leads design reviews, develops senior technical talent, and supports hiring. The role requires strategic leadership alongside hands-on technical execution across scalable SaaS systems.
Xello is looking for a Principal Engineer
This role is a remote role, looking for candidates within Canada only, working in Eastern Time Zone hours.
__Who are you?
The compensation range for this role is $180,000 - $220,000 CAD. The final offer will be determined based on the candidate's experience and expertise, as assessed during the interview process.
This role is a remote role, looking for candidates within Canada only, working in Eastern Time Zone hours.
__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 frontend 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.
The compensation range for this role is $180,000 - $220,000 CAD. The final offer will be determined based on the candidate's experience and expertise, as assessed during the interview process.
Similar Jobs
Cloud • Security • Software • Generative AI
Lead development of Elasticsearch vector similarity search capabilities, including new features, algorithms, data structures, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Collaborate with a globally distributed engineering and open-source community, provide technical expertise, guide initiatives autonomously, and write modern Java for scalable search systems.
Top Skills:
Apache LuceneCassandraElasticsearchGitHnswIvfJavaMongoDBPostgresSlackSolrZoom
Cloud • Security • Software • Generative AI
Lead architectural and code-level performance engineering for Elasticsearch. Own major optimization initiatives, develop performance models, profile distributed systems, identify bottlenecks, build benchmarks and regression detection, and improve scalability across stateful and serverless architectures. Develop AI-assisted optimization and benchmarking harnesses, collaborate across teams, and mentor engineers. Work includes Java and JVM optimization, concurrency, distributed systems, vector search, storage engines, and native library integration.
Top Skills:
C++Distributed SystemsElasticsearchEs|QlFlamegraphsJavaJmhJvmRallyRustSimdVector Search
Artificial Intelligence • Generative AI
Lead architecture and core runtime foundations for a distributed scanner platform, driving reliability, observability, performance, and engineering rigor while collaborating with hardware and ML teams and mentoring engineers.
Top Skills:
AsyncioCiGrpcMultiprocessingProfilingProtobufPython
What you need to know about the Boston Tech Scene
Boston is a powerhouse for technology innovation thanks to world-class research universities like MIT and Harvard and a robust pipeline of venture capital investment. Host to the first telephone call and one of the first general-purpose computers ever put into use, Boston is now a hub for biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence — though it’s also home to several B2B software giants. So it’s no surprise that the city consistently ranks among the greatest startup ecosystems in the world.
Key Facts About Boston Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 269,000; 9.4% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Thermo Fisher Scientific, Toast, Klaviyo, HubSpot, DraftKings
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, software, aerospace
- Funding Landscape: $15.7 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Summit Partners, Volition Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, MassVentures, Highland Capital Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: MIT, Harvard University, Boston College, Tufts University, Boston University, Northeastern University, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, National Bureau of Economic Research, Broad Institute, Lowell Center for Space Science & Technology, National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories
