Principal Engineer, Homebase
Core Product
$237.3-305.8k
Salary applicable for US candidates, dependent on location, may vary in other + Stock options
More information about location
2+ days a week in office
Employee scheduling software for small businesses
Be an early applicant
Employee scheduling software for small businesses
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$237.3-305.8k
Salary applicable for US candidates, dependent on location, may vary in other + Stock options
More information about location
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make local business teams unstoppable.
Role
Who you are
- This is a role for someone who thinks in systems, ships with urgency, and elevates everyone around them
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in scaling distributed systems and evolving legacy architectures
- Ideal candidate brings a strong background in Ruby/Rails
- Track record of defining and executing technical strategy across multiple product domains or teams — not just within one team
- Passion for mentoring engineers and guiding teams through architectural change
- Deep expertise in domain-driven design, API design, SOA and event-driven architectures
- Experience with payroll, workforce management, or similarly complex business domains is a strong plus
- Proven ability to influence without authority — you drive alignment through clarity of thought and collaboration
- Strong communication skills: you can explain complex technical decisions to engineers, PMs, and executives alike
- Active, high-leverage AI fluency — you use AI tools daily to improve your outcomes as an engineer and have helped teams adopt AI to create leverage, not slop
- Comfort operating in a high-velocity environment where shipping fast and iterating matters
- Experience comes in many forms—so if you're excited about this role, even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications, we encourage you to apply!
What the job involves
- As Principal Engineer, Core Product, you'll be the senior technical leader across Homebase's most critical product domains: Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, HR Management (HRM)
- You’ll contribute to Homebase business goals by thinking 18+ months in the future to deliver technical capabilities that support a resilient, maintainable, scalable, and trustworthy product
- Ou'll work at the intersection of deep technical craft and business impact — partnering closely with product, data, design, and engineering leadership to shape what Homebase builds and how we build it
- These are the key ways you’ll contribute and create impact in this role:
- Technical Leadership: In collaboration with our Technical Leadership group of Staff and Principal Engineers, drive Homebase’s technical vision and architecture across our Core Product domains such as Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, and HRM — creating coherence across domains that today serve 100K+ SMBs
- API Strategy: Champion and help deliver Homebase's API strategy — building a platform that enables internal velocity, external integrations, and future partnership opportunities
- Service Architecture: Lead the decomposition of core product systems into well-bounded services using domain-driven design and SOA principles
- Technical Problem Solving: Identify and resolve cross-cutting technical challenges — data consistency, performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps — before they become customer problems
- Engineering Excellence: Support and champion the Engineering culture to scale Engineering Excellence in all teams. Drive standards and patterns that are adopted because they're good, not because they're mandated; mentor senior and staff engineers to raise the overall bar
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Product, Data, Design and Engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and ensure technical strategy aligns with business priorities
- AI-First Engineering: Experiment with and deploy/build harness capabilities to accelerate engineering workflows — from code generation to test automation — and coach teams on doing the same
- Aligned with our belief that the best use of AI accelerates quality of the codebase and quality products as well as delivery velocity
- Champion AI adoption across teams you influence — continually identifying where AI creates real leverage vs. noise
- Measure and share the impact of AI-enabled improvements on velocity, quality, or developer experience
- As a key member in Engineering Leadership, contribute to AI platform efforts that will enable Homebase to deliver outsized customer benefit through faster product development and higher quality features
Application process
- Meet the Talent Acquisition team, Mavel W
- Meet the Hiring Manager, Andrea C
- Participate in a Technical Interview
- Meet Cross-functional Partners in Product & Engineering
- Connect on Values & AI Mindset with Senior Engineers
- Background Check + Offer Stage
- Welcome to the team, Homie 🎉
Our take
Homebase provides employees and businesses with time tracking applications, with a range of other HR functionality built in. Homebase automates the process of managing employee scheduling and also helps companies improve internal communications.
The company contributes to the reduction of paperwork in an office by turning an array of devices into time clocks that track hours and overtime, while also providing payroll support. This makes it easier for companies to remain in sync, running a more efficient operation as a result.
Given that Homebase's customer base of small businesses is not able to pay a lot for its product, scale is the key driver in the company's future success. With over 100,000 customers already, its significant venture capital backing will ensure that the company will be able to grow (notably, it's investing in Canadian talent) to provide its services on a profitable scale.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
29% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2024
$60m
SERIES D
Nov 2021
$30m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $189m
Company benefits
- Stock Options
- Paid parental leave
- Generous paid time off options
- Offsites, customer days & social events
- Work from Anywhere Month
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance 🇺🇸
- 401(k) matching program 🇺🇸
- Pre-tax commuter benefits 🇺🇸
- Snacks + lunch on us at hub offices 🇺🇸
- MasterClass at Work for ongoing learning 🇺🇸
- Group health benefits coverage 🇨🇦
- Group RRSP with employer match + TFSA 🇨🇦
- Snacks + lunch on us at hub offices 🇨🇦
- MasterClass at Work for ongoing learning 🇨🇦
Company HQ
Yerba Buena, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
John Waldmann
(Founder & CEO)BA Political Science at Stanford. Associate at Boston Consulting Group, then KKR Capstone, before founding Homebase in 2014.
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