Staff Full Stack Engineer at Thinkific

Can you architect scalable, reliable systems while mentoring others to reach their technical best? We’re looking for a Staff Full Stack Engineer to join us at Thinkific.

In this role, you’ll design and implement high-impact technical solutions, set architectural direction, and ensure our systems scale to meet the needs of a growing global customer base. You’ll play a critical role in raising the technical bar across teams by guiding best practices, solving complex engineering challenges, and unblocking high-priority initiatives. You’ll collaborate closely with other Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and our Engineering Leadership team to help us deliver a platform that businesses can rely on to grow and thrive.

Your goal will be to help guide and execute on projects related to your technical domain. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

• Own a technical domain within our system and be accountable for operations and SLOs related to performance, reliability, security, as well as ongoing architectural evolution and maintenance of this domain and related documentation as it aligns with overall technical strategy and guiding principles.
• Contribute to the overall technical strategy, helping the business make technical decisions by providing high level technical estimates, options, and feasibility opinions, and creating and reviewing proposals for new technologies, patterns and implementations.
• Collaborate with engineering managers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define requirements and specifications for software projects.
• Advocate for engineering best practices by sharing knowledge, teaching others new skills, and contributing to improving engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Lead technical discussions, mentor other engineers to grow and improve the overall team's productivity.
• Be a core implementer for your team, role modeling with clean, efficient, and maintainable code in accordance with best practices, coding and testing standards and be responsible for upholding these standards within your team.
• Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshooting production issues to maintain service reliability.

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has experience working in a staff engineering role
• Has 7+ years of experience working as a software engineer, with 2+ years in a technical leadership position
• Is an expert in architectural approaches related to the technical domain.
• Backend: Event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, and multi-tenant systems
• Frontend: Component libraries and frameworks, design systems, accessibility, internationalization & globalization.
• Understands and is proficient in multiple related languages.
• Backend: Ruby, Golang, or Node and also has expert-level knowledge of relational and non-relational database technologies such as Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB
• Frontend: React, Next.js, Node, TypeScript, GraphQL, HTML, CSS
• Is experienced with asynchronous job processing, using queuing technologies such as SNS, SQS, and Sidekiq
• Love to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business
• Combines strong product thinking with adaptability, ownership, and collaborative leadership. They know when to lead, when to listen, and how to elevate the team around them.

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• Backend:
  • Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and streaming technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Kinesis
  • An understanding of how to work with infrastructure as code technologies, such as Terraform
  • Experience with containers and orchestration via Docker and Kubernetes
• Frontend:
  • Experience with compliance to accessibility standards such as WCAG

We’re committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you’re at and where you can grow. This role has a salary range of $148,000 - $185,000 - $222,000 in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.

For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.