Principal Software Engineer

Dovetail is the world’s leading customer insights hub, helping thousands of teams build better products. From user feedback and customer interviews to support tickets and sales calls, Dovetail helps you uncover insights fast—no matter the method. Driven by ambition and innovation, the Dovetail team is customer-obsessed and on a mission to help the world improve the quality of every thing. Join the ranks of Atlassian, The New York Times, Spotify, Universal, Porsche, Starbucks, and thousands more as they put their customer first with Dovetail and improve the quality of their thing.

Founded in 2017 by Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers, Dovetail has 100+ employees across offices in Sydney and San Francisco.

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to join one of our Product Engineering Teams focusing on the full Project Experience for our customers. The team has an extremely high impact and is faced with the challenge of building a powerful product whilst providing simplicity to our customers.

We’re all about sweating the details on delightful experiences, tackling ambitious technical challenges head-on, and constantly delivering customer value. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a critical part of guiding our teams in executing projects, being proactive in identifying changes in our architecture whilst playing a key role in defining and communicating our tech strategy to the rest of the product organization.

What you'll do

• Collaborate with and support engineering teams. You can effectively build trust with engineers by having an empathetic, supportive approach to helping them with their biggest challenges. You are an intent listener and seek first to understand these challenges. You can motivate by helping team members think in ways they hadn’t considered before. You don’t just do the thing, you show others how it can be done.
• Define and communicate our technical strategy. Working with our Technical Leadership, you will define Dovetail’s technological vision and strategy, which complements our product vision. You are a constant advocate for this strategy and guide our technical leads to build our platform in service of your vision. You listen and consider suggestions to evolve your vision, and are comfortable making changes in the face of new information.
• Identify, prioritize and solve systemic technical challenges. You are in constant pursuit of our next big systemic challenges, especially those that cut across multiple teams. You not only proactively raise these issues, but work closely with product leadership to explore solutions, determine priorities, and lead projects to solve them.
• Investigate and validate new technologies. You proactively determine when we need to investigate new technologies to support the execution of our product roadmap. You are one of the primary innovators within our engineering function. You are just as comfortable testing out new technologies as you are teaching our teams about them.
• Advocate for and maintain engineering quality. Dovetail takes great pride in the quality of the software we ship to our customers, and that starts with the standard that you set for our teams. You’ll support team members in understanding these expectations and find scalable ways to prevent the introduction of bugs, regressions, UX inconsistencies, or performance issues.

Your background

• Extensive experience building web products. You'll have hands-on exposure to building the frontend and backend of web products with technology like TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Node, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Any exposure to AI products/features would be a great help too.
• Excellent communicator. You can easily convey your thoughts, opinions, and feelings with your product team and have the ability to articulate effort vs impact tradeoffs. When required you can also be a strong storyteller to get buy-in from other teams.
• Experience managing complex software projects. You'll have the ability to own the delivery of complex features, break down requirements and provide reasonable estimates. You have worked on projects with stakeholders across multiple teams and functional roles.
• You have experience teaching others. You have mentored junior team members to help them learn to think through complex problems, adopt new technologies, and improve their decision-making.
• You are pragmatic and flexible. Like your new teammates, you're used to doing what's necessary to get the job done. You'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, be resourceful to solve problems, and be able to adjust to shifting deadlines and project goals.
• When you do it, you nail it. You share our keen eye for quality. You don't half-ass your work, instead what you ship is top-notch. You cut scope before cutting quality. You are seen as someone who leads by setting a high bar for others to follow.

At Dovetail, we’re passionate about building and fostering an environment where every team member feels supported and valued. We celebrate individualism, welcoming everyone to show up as their authentic selves every day. It’s no secret that diversity builds the best teams, large or small, so we highly encourage applications from people who identify as part of an under-represented group. Please take a peek at Dovetail’s commitment to Program 50/50 and hear why we’re officially a Great Place to Work on our careers page for more info!

Benefits

• Equity for everyone. We put our money where our mouth is. No matter your role, we provide equity for all along with competitive salaries. See your investment grow as Dovetail grows.
• Annual retreats. We aim to go away every year to celebrate achievements and have some fun as a team. New Zealand followed by the Whitsundays… where to next?
• Equal parental leave. We offer an inclusive framework of 20 weeks equal paid leave to support new parents. Every family is unique, so you make the call how you’d like to take care of what matters most.
• Modern and pet friendly offices. Bring your pooch to our modern, ergonomic offices in the heart of Surry Hills. We also host monthly events for the whole team to connect and unwind.
• Flexible work-life balance. We love our bright and shiny offices, celebrating wins together, and working on super collaborative and cross-functional projects. While our teams love coming together IRL, we also let you make the call on how and where you want to work.
• Develop and grow. Take a course, attend a lunch and learn, or head to a conference to help you grow! We love to support you any way we can, so expect Dovetail to be your #1 fan when it comes to achieving your career goals.
• Extra paid days off. Enjoy ad-hoc KitKat days to take a step back and spend it however you like. Hit the beach, spend time with your family, pick up that hobby you’ve been meaning to try, or anything in between!
• Health is wealth. We believe that everyone has the right to mental wellness and support. So every Dovetailer has access to Uprise (Employee Assistance Program) for themselves as well as their families.
• Floating public holidays. Public holidays don’t always align with when you want to take leave. So the choice is yours when it comes to swapping public holiday leave for a later date. You do you!