Principal Software Engineer, Workiva
$177-284k
+ Equity + Bonus
Software for sustainability, GRC & financial reporting
Open for applications
Software for sustainability, GRC & financial reporting
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$177-284k
+ Equity + Bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
To power transparent reporting for a better world.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of experience building and scaling complex software systems
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field; or 6+ years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 4+ years of experience; or equivalent practical experience
- Demonstrated experience using AI as a primary development collaborator, with a strong quality bar for AI-generated output
Desirable
- Proven success leading large, cross-pillar technical initiatives
- Track record of working effectively across platform modernization, iterative product development, and greenfield delivery
- Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and platform design
- Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers
- Experience improving engineering testing standards through approaches such as TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, or mutation testing
- Experience building infrastructure that improves engineering velocity and quality at scale
- Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture
- Experience inferring behavioral specifications from existing systems through code, tests, logs, and subject-matter experts
- Ability to deliver production-quality outcomes in a small, time-boxed team setting
- Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating durable, useful artifacts
- A leadership style that empowers others rather than creating dependency
What the job involves
- We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer who can operate across multiple modes of work: platform modernization, iterative product development, and high-ambition greenfield exploration
- This is a hands-on role for someone who can define strategy, deliver complex systems, and raise the technical bar for the teams around them
- Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product bets
- Adapt your technical approach, planning style, and delivery strategy to match the needs of the work
- Use AI-native development methods to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve speed, quality, and leverage
- Lead technical strategy across large, multi-team initiatives with long-term impact
- Define and evolve system boundaries across complex domains, with a focus on clean interfaces and scalability
- Identify and remove bottlenecks in performance, data flow, reliability, and architecture
- Lead exploration, prototyping, and validation for ambiguous technical problems
- Partner with cross-functional peers on disaster recovery planning, testing, and optimization
- Design systems that enable autonomous or semi-autonomous engineering workflows
- Build context-aware infrastructure that connects code, documentation, and systems to AI tooling
- Develop guardrails such as validation layers, static analysis, and automation hooks to ensure safe and reliable AI-assisted development
- Improve how AI is used across the organization for both effectiveness and efficiency
- Raise the technical bar by helping teams think bigger and execute better
- Mentor and challenge Staff+ engineers to expand their scope, judgment, and impact
- Partner with engineering and product leadership to align technical decisions with business outcomes
- Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others
- Contribute across product domains, bringing context from one area to solve problems in another
Our take
For large-scale businesses, collecting and sharing data can be a complex and challenging process. Workiva solves this problem with its AI-powered data platform.
Workiva is one of the biggest players in the market, serving around 75% of Fortune 500 companies, including Google and Delta. Workiva's controlled, secure and audit-ready platform has maintained a clear edge over much of its competition.
Workiva's quality product and its commitment to transparency has made it a firm favourite with companies around the world. If it can maintain this, it stands to consolidate its impressive growth even further in the coming years.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Oct 2014
$0.7m
EARLY VC
Dec 2012
$30.7m
SERIES C
Total funding: $46.9m
Company HQ
Ames, IA
Leadership
Julie Iskow
(CEO)Julie joined Workiva in 2019 sa COO/President and became CEO in 2023. Previously, she served as the CTO at Medidate Solutions and as the CIO at WageWorks.
David Haila
(CTO)David has been at Workiva since 2009, joining the team as a Senior Software Engineer. Since then, he has held a number of roles and became CTO in 2023.
Jill Klindt
(CFO & EVP)Jill has been at Workiva since 2008, joining as a Controller before holding a number of roles and becoming CFO & EVP in 2023. Previously, she held Financial roles at Financial Intelligence, Wells Fargo Financial, CitiMortgage, and Principal Financial Group.
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