Principal Software Engineer

Lead our platform end-to-end, guide cross-functional decisions, and ship at a startup pace. Ideal candidates have previous startup experience as a founding/early engineer or founder.

Fully remote (US and Canada preferred)
$250K – $300K + equity (US and Canada range)

✦

Goody helps companies recognize employees, close sales deals, and make people’s days with the easiest, best-designed gifting platform in the market—no mailing address required. Founded five years ago, we’ve powered gifting for Google, Stripe, Meta, Notion, Anthropic, and more.

Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted, and our mission is to capture that market opportunity and spread joy and positivity!

Our stack: Ruby/Rails, React, Tailwind, Postgres (we’re open to strong experience in any modern backend language).

Most important qualities

Startup mindset. You move extremely fast — you can ship a sizable feature in a week or less.

As a startup, our advantage is agility and speed. You should move at a startup pace, be known to be faster than most engineers in shipping code, and set the pace for the rest of the team. Ideally, you have previous startup experience as a founding/early engineer or as a founder.

You can understand the entire company’s technical architecture, and use that mental model to make decisions with cross-functional teams.

As a principal engineer, you should be able to understand, at a high/medium level, all of the company’s technical architecture. You should be able to use this knowledge to work with other teams in the company to explore and validate needs, wants, and ideas, and build across the stack.

You are a multiplier for the rest of the engineering team.

You’re able to create leverage within our engineering team through identifying ways to improve our engineering processes proactively and reactively, coaching engineers, and sharing your experience and knowledge to help us move faster.

Requirements

• 8+ years building production web apps; at least 2 years as Principal, Senior Staff, or Tech Lead
• Depth in at least one backend language; highly experienced in React and TypeScript
• Proven record of high performance and execution at a high-growth startup
• This is an IC role where you will be primarily coding as part of your work
• Write code that balances speed, reliability, and quality

Location

This is a fully remote opportunity. We prefer applicants in US and Canada, with a further preference for areas where our current employees are: San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles.

What we offer

• Base salary range of $250–300K USD plus stock options (US and Canada salary range; cost of living adjusted outside of the US and Canada)
• We offer benefits and perks to our employees including but not limited to: comprehensive medical plans, including vision and dental, flexible PTO, paid family leave, education and wellness stipends, and (of course!) lots of gifts.
• Fully remote company with opportunities to meet in person, such as regional meetups and our annual company offsite.
• AI usage is highly recommended: We encourage and pay for the use of AI tools, both general and software development-specific. Most of our team uses tools like Cursor and Claude Code. We are early adopters of emerging AI tools, and lurk in Discord servers where people benchmark new models and tools. Go ahead and use Claude Opus 4 MAX and bill the company card.