Principal Engineer, Core Product (Hybrid)

Homebase•San Francisco, CA

4d•$237,300 - $305,800•Hybrid

About The Position

As Principal Engineer, Core Product, you'll be the senior technical leader across Homebase's most critical product domains: Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, HR Management (HRM). You’ll contribute to Homebase business goals by thinking 18+ months in the future to deliver technical capabilities that support a resilient, maintainable, scalable, and trustworthy product. This is a role for someone who thinks in systems, ships with urgency, and elevates everyone around them. You'll work at the intersection of deep technical craft and business impact — partnering closely with product, data, design, and engineering leadership to shape what Homebase builds and how we build it.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in scaling distributed systems and evolving legacy architectures
Strong background in Ruby/Rails
Track record of defining and executing technical strategy across multiple product domains or teams — not just within one team
Deep expertise in domain-driven design, API design, SOA and event-driven architectures
Proven ability to influence without authority — you drive alignment through clarity of thought and collaboration
Strong communication skills: you can explain complex technical decisions to engineers, PMs, and executives alike
Active, high-leverage AI fluency — you use AI tools daily to improve your outcomes as an engineer and have helped teams adopt AI to create leverage, not slop.
Comfort operating in a high-velocity environment where shipping fast and iterating matters

Nice To Haves

Experience with payroll, workforce management, or similarly complex business domains is a strong plus
Passion for mentoring engineers and guiding teams through architectural change.

Responsibilities

Drive Homebase’s technical vision and architecture across our Core Product domains such as Payroll, Scheduling, Time Tracking, and HRM — creating coherence across domains that today serve 100K+ SMBs
Champion and help deliver Homebase's API strategy — building a platform that enables internal velocity, external integrations, and future partnership opportunities
Lead the decomposition of core product systems into well-bounded services using domain-driven design and SOA principles
Identify and resolve cross-cutting technical challenges — data consistency, performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps — before they become customer problems
Support and champion the Engineering culture to scale Engineering Excellence in all teams. Drive standards and patterns that are adopted because they're good, not because they're mandated; mentor senior and staff engineers to raise the overall bar
Partner with Product, Data, Design and Engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and ensure technical strategy aligns with business priorities
Experiment with and deploy/build harness capabilities to accelerate engineering workflows — from code generation to test automation — and coach teams on doing the same. Aligned with our belief that the best use of AI accelerates quality of the codebase and quality products as well as delivery velocity.
Champion AI adoption across teams you influence — continually identifying where AI creates real leverage vs. noise
Measure and share the impact of AI-enabled improvements on velocity, quality, or developer experience
As a key member in Engineering Leadership, contribute to AI platform efforts that will enable Homebase to deliver outsized customer benefit through faster product development and higher quality features