Principal Engineer

Overall

As a Principal Engineer, you’re one of Glossier’s “chief architects”. You have a significant strategic vision and can take a high-level business plan for growth and translate it into a strategic technology roadmap. You’re super-technically savvy and your primary job is focusing on long-term architectural and technology needs to grow the business.

Responsibilities

This level implies strategic impact over the team, as you’re dealing with very deep technical problems over long periods of time. The problems that you’re solving are very open-ended.

You’re sought-after for technical guidance across the team. You have a track record of anticipating technical problems during the development of major products and designing solutions to overcome them. You’re deeply knowledgeable in major parts of our technology stack and are the technical owner of large parts of our code base. You have a sustained track record of creating major improvements in large business-critical systems around stability, security, performance, and scalability.

As a Principal Engineer, you’re still acting in a very hands-on role, and as such, you’re a prolific contributor to both Glossier’s core projects as well as side and experimental work. When presented with a complex problem, process or existing system, you’re able to reduce the complexity in order to maximize efficiencies. This ability to manage and simplify complexity is your hallmark. Working with you should leave team members feeling like they’re leaving with something significantly better than they came in with.

You and Your Team

You have broad impact across Glossier tech. You create architecture that shapes large parts of our business, and ship complex projects including many systems or major pieces of infrastructure. The impact of your work is felt across the team in the quality of the engineering that we produce, the ways we write code, the core libraries that we use, and the underlying design of systems. There are multiple obvious large technical contributions that can be pointed to as originating from this team member.

You have excellent abilities to influence without requiring reporting authority to do so. You effectively facilitate cross-team work and are influential far beyond your individual group. You’re capable of driving groups of disparate interests to decisions, with clear communication and follow through. You’re capable of setting short, medium and long-term strategic direction for aspects of the technology stack, identifying areas of critical need based on future growth and developing roadmaps to attack these problems.

Example Skills and Behaviors

Knowledge

• Deep and broad knowledge in area of specialization;
• Highly proficient, top talent recognized in industry/field
• Identifies deep-rooted, systemic issues within the stack and leads long-term initiatives to address them

Communications

• Effectively advises executives to refine and inform Glossier strategy
• Ability to represent Glossier as an owner of strategic partnerships and/or key relationships
• Articulates the technical direction of the engineering team
• Ensures that Glossier runs an inclusive process for making technical decisions

Executing / Delivering Goals

• Applies extensive subject matter knowledge and honed perspective to inform sub-function and/or Glossier’s goals
• Leads the technical aspects of projects that have strategic impact at Glossier
• Owns the longterm roadmap for major areas of the technology stack. Trusted to independently prioritize projects and handle execution
• Introduces improvements that help the entire team become more productive and ship higher quality work

Discretion / Supervision

• Takes guidance and input from leadership, but ultimately carries accountability of meeting objectives