FreshBooks has an ambitious vision. We launched in 2003 but we’re just getting started and there’s a lot left to do. We're a high-performing team working towards a common goal: building an elite online accounting application to help small businesses better handle their finances. Known for extraordinary product and customer service experiences and based in Toronto, Canada, FreshBooks serves paying customers in over 120 countries.

The Opportunity - Principal Software Engineer

We’re looking for a strong technical leader who has the gravitas to influence and has deep knowledge of building and designing SaaS products. An effective communicator, a mentor who can think on their feet and be able to come up with practical, simple solutions to complex problems. As a Principal Engineer, you are someone who can redefine engineering capability and constantly push boundaries. You will be owning FreshBooks’ one of the significant product lines to ensure scalability and elasticity. 

If this appeals to you, please come and chat with us to learn more about how you can become a part of the intrinsically motivated teams of engineers!

What you'll do in your first twelve months at FreshBooks:

  • Collaborate with cross-functional Product teams working on features for our customers.
  • Advocate best practices, contribution to roadmaps, domain breadth and/or depth, stewardship, mentoring others.
  • Communicate technical vision and challenges across different levels of the business including Senior Executives and Senior Leadership group. 
  • Help in growing the technical expertise of the team as they continue to work and touch services outside their realm.
  • Demonstrate experience coaching and mentoring technical teams, and growing the overall technical maturity of our Engineering organization.
  • Evolve our technical architecture to scale with our rapidly growing customer community
  • Develop a deep understanding of multiple parts of our stack as well as the processes and technologies relevant to our tech space.
  • Be capable of supporting the product from end to end.
  • Raise the bar for our entire engineering team through best practices, automation, documentation, and hiring.
  • Level up our operational excellence, and drive our team to maintain it, so that common regressions are root caused.
  • Support operational excellence and make measurable improvements to our support processes.

What you bring:

  • Excellent technical leadership in web application development (Agile or Lean environment)
  • 5+ years with cloud-native and microservice-based architectures.
  • Strong experience in one of our core technologies - Python and Ruby on Rails - or a strong track record in C, C++ or Java.
  • Demonstrated focus on continuous quality, deployment and delivery of services through an emphasis on automation, and strong Engineering Systems.
  • Proven ability to articulate the value of foundational technology approaches to technology leaders.
  • Strong understanding of Docker-based containers, Kubernetes, or other container schedulers.
  • Experience with databases and SQL – our database is MySQL.
  • Experience in designing, writing and building with REST APIs.
  • A deep understanding of test-driven (and behaviour driven) development, and of building substantially complete test code, and not just for the happy path.
  • Familiarity with continuous integration (or better, continuous delivery) and automated build pipelines.
  • The ability to balance the desire to ship code quickly to our customers with the responsibility of making good technical decisions.
  • A long-standing habit of continuous learning, and of applying new technologies, architectures, and methodologies to improve the code and Engineering organization.

What you might bring: 

We're looking for a variety of talented technical leadership and know that a mix of skills and experience is useful. Even having a couple of the skills from the list below would be a strong asset.

  • Expertise in the core areas of business of FreshBooks (accounting, payments, small business solutions)
  • A background in DevOps and service ownership, and a clear understanding of bounded contexts and how they map onto microservices
  • Strong pair programming both as a mechanism for producing better code and for teaching skills 
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, or other similar tools
  • Experience with Google Cloud Platform, or another major cloud provider such as AWS
  • Experience with Redis / Elasticsearch & RabbitMQ
  • Nice to have GraphQL and JSON API
  • Front-end development experience, knowledge of JavaScript modern frameworks and client-side performance optimization

Why Join Us

We're a motivated bunch, with our eye’s laser-focused on shipping extraordinary experiences to businesses. You will be surrounded by hardworking team members who share a common vision for what an amazing software company could be and have the opportunity to help build an elite one, right here in downtown Toronto.

Apply Now

Have we got your attention? Submit your application today and a member of our recruitment team will be in touch with you shortly!

FreshBooks is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, religion, race, mental disability, sexual orientation, age, or any other status. All applicants are considered based on their qualifications and merits. At FreshBooks, we inspire an environment of mutual respect and we believe diversity and inclusion are crucial to our success.

Here at FreshBooks, we welcome and encourage applications from people with disabilities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please advise your recruiter on how we can meet your needs to ensure a fair and equitable selection process in a confidential manner.

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