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Instructure is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to set architectural direction across the Assessments group, which spans Canvas by Instructure, Mastery, multiple services, and third-party integrations. This is not a single-product-area ownership role; instead, you will own how the pieces fit together and be accountable for architectural decisions across the domain.
You will be responsible for finishing things: writing architecture documentation, getting it reviewed, landing it on committed dates, and driving results. A significant portion of your time will be spent raising the technical maturity of senior engineers through coaching and sponsorship.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting architectural direction across Assessments domains while maintaining alignment with wider engineering strategy
- Owning end-to-end decisions: bringing recommendations, building alignment, and driving resolution with committed dates
- Writing and maintaining tech specs, design records, and decision documents that other teams build against
- Defining service boundaries between Assessments and adjacent domains (core platform, data, quality engineering, security)
- Leading build-versus-buy evaluations with third-party vendors alongside your director
- Coaching and sponsoring senior and staff engineers to take on architectural work
- Setting standards for AI use in engineering work and sharing best practices
- Shaping reliability and testing strategy to reduce on-call burden
Instructure offers competitive compensation with an ownership program for all full-time employees, flexible work culture (remote, hybrid, and in-office options vary by role and location), generous time off including local holidays and an annual December recharge period, comprehensive wellness and mental health support, learning and development resources with tuition reimbursement, and a culture rooted in inclusivity and meaningful connection.
Requirements:
- 10+ years building and operating production software, with several years at staff level or above
- Track record of driving architecture decisions to completion across multiple teams
- Clear technical writing that makes complex trade-offs legible to engineers, product, and executives
- Evidence of growing other senior engineers through mentoring and/or sponsorship
- Proficiency building and maintaining software on cloud-native platforms (preferably AWS)
- Comfort with ambiguity, including defining problems before solving them
- Sound judgment about scope and ability to delegate appropriately
Nice to have:
- Experience with assessment, learning, or education technology systems
- Experience consolidating or replacing legacy systems while they remain in production
- Multi-tenant, sharded, or high-volume platform experience
- Experience with Ruby on Rails
