Principal Software Engineer

About the role

At Instructure, we believe in the power of people to grow and succeed throughout their lives. Our goal is to amplify that power by creating intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development, facilitate meaningful relationships, and inspire people to go further in their education and careers. We do this by giving smart, creative, passionate people opportunities to create awesome. And that's where you come in:

We're hiring a Principal Software Engineer to set architectural direction across the Assessments group. Assessment spans Canvas by Instructure and Mastery, several services, and a set of third-party integrations. You won't own a single product area. You'll own how the pieces fit together, and you'll be accountable for the decisions rather than just the recommendations.

This role suits someone who finishes things. You'll write the architecture down, get it reviewed, land it on a date you committed to, and then drive it to a result. Expect to spend as much time raising the technical maturity of our senior engineers as you spend designing systems.

What you'll do.

- Set architectural direction across Assessments domains, and keep it aligned with the wider engineering strategy.

- Own decisions end to end. Bring a recommendation, get alignment, and drive it to a resolution with a date attached.

- Write and maintain the tech specs, design records, and decision docs that other teams build against.

- Define the boundaries between our services and adjacent domains, including core platform, data, quality engineering, and security.

- Along with your director lead build-versus-buy evaluations with third-party vendors, and document what both sides commit to.

- Coach and sponsor senior and staff engineers so they can take on architectural work themselves.

- Set the standard for using AI in engineering work, and share what works so others can copy it.

- Shape reliability and testing strategy across the group, and cut the sources of repeated on-call load.

What you'll bring.

- 10 or more years building and operating production software, several of them at staff level or above.

- A track record of architecture decisions you drove to completion across more than one team.

- Clear technical writing that makes a complex trade-off legible to engineers, product, and executives.

- Evidence you've grown other senior engineers, through mentoring, sponsorship, or both.

- Proficiency with building and maintaining software on cloud native platforms (preferably AWS)

- Comfort with ambiguity, including defining the problem before solving it.

- Judgment about scope, so you delegate work that belongs at another level instead of absorbing it.

Nice to have.

- Experience with assessment, learning, or education technology systems.

- Experience consolidating or replacing a legacy system while it stays in production.