Principal Engineer, Financial Management Software

We're building a movement - an education revolution. We're building a world where anyone, anywhere can have access to the best education regardless of where they were born. At our core, we believe education is a right, not a privilege. To that end, we're building a company and a suite of products to lead the charge in transforming access to education.

ApplyBoard is an online platform that empowers students around the world to access the best education by connecting international students, recruitment partners, and academic institutions. We simplify the study abroad search, application, and acceptance process. Not only do we help students with their study abroad journey, but we also help academic institutions to find the best students globally. Our goal is to help enable better, more diverse, schools that are enriched with cultures from all over the world.

The Opportunity:

As a Principal Engineer for our Financial Management team, your mission is to provide technical leadership to a group of engineers who deliver the transactional, account-management and financial-reporting capabilities within our products and services. These mission-critical systems enable the financial processes that support both students (who pay fees and tuition) and recruitment partners (who work with ApplyBoard to help those students succeed).

What you'll be doing every day:

• Guide and assist 1-2 engineering teams, helping them to overcome technical challenges as they develop new capabilities and enhancements - both for students, and for the ApplyBoard staff and partners who help students achieve their dream of studying abroad
• Investigate, evaluate, and prototype different approaches and solutions to delight users, fulfill product requirements, and achieve business goals
• Help your team break down large, complex technical problems into tractable chunks, and organize the work to tackle them incrementally
• Work closely with Engineering and Product leaders to develop our technical vision, the strategy for realizing that vision, and the roadmap to execute on both technical investments and new/improved product capabilities
• Identify and act on opportunities to improve the way we plan, develop, test and deploy our software
• Actively promote excellence in software engineering, introducing advanced techniques and new tools to help engineers improve their craft and deliver better software

What you bring to the table:

• Experience providing technical guidance to teams of engineers developing web-based commercial software that users love, across multiple domains and industries
• Great communication skills. (Yes, everyone writes that - but we really mean it.)
• Demonstrated ownership and pride in the quality of the software you work on, and the way that it succeeds in meeting the needs of its users
• Extensive knowledge of design patterns, architectural paradigms, programming languages, tech stacks and frameworks - and deep understanding of the trade-offs entailed in choosing among them
• Ability to influence and win over others by laying out the pros and cons of different options and the reasoning which supports your decisions, while maintaining an open-minded and collaborative atmosphere that makes people eager to work with you
• A high level of skill and craftsmanship in building secure software that stands the test of time
• Experience building and evolving financial software products. For example: bookkeeping and accounting; eCommerce tracking & reporting systems; gift cards, store credit and/or loyalty programs.
• Familiarity with engineering techniques to ensure compliance with PCI, KYC, AML, accounting standards and other regulatory requirements for financial software
• Experience researching potential third-party technology solutions, and thoroughly evaluating when to build our own and when to pay for technology built by others
• Track record of introducing the technical side of Agile software development to your teams, and explaining both how to apply its practices and the underlying principles which make them effective

Ideally, you also have experience with many of:

• Developing and maintaining products that are used by many thousands or millions of people
• High-growth start-up or scale-up environments
• Building and evolving software products which integrate with payment services, currency-conversion services, and/or banking APIs (whether proprietary or open). For example: Paypal, Stripe, Square, Tribe, Transferwise, Plaid, Yodlee.
• Cross-border payments, especially to and from under-served countries and regions. (Antarctica would be cool, but we aren't really expecting that :-P.)
• Ruby, Rails, React, Node.js, Typescript, or python
• Kafka, Amazon MQ, RabbitMQ or similar streaming or messaging systems
• A variety of databases (relational and non-relational)
• ORM frameworks and their alternatives
• Microservices or SOA; RESTful APIs
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
• DevOps, Observability, Infrastructure as Code

What We Offer:

• The opportunity to have an impact on a product that is positively affecting change to thousands of students lives every day
• Working alongside a brilliant and globally diverse team based in Waterloo and Toronto
• Great compensation and benefits package to keep you healthy and happy!
• Thank you for your interest in ApplyBoard, however, only those applicants that have been selected for an interview will be contacted.

At ApplyBoard, we understand the value of having a diverse team. That's why we believe in providing equal opportunity regardless of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, and conviction. Please let us know if you require accommodation during the recruitment process.