Principal Engineer

SPAN Digital is a growing premium software product and consulting services company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional development offices in Cape Town, South Africa, and Guadalajara, Mexico. We have experience in a broad range of industries but are keenly focused on the technology, entertainment, and healthcare sectors. We strategize, design, and develop software solutions for our clients and customers from startups to global brands. We help engineering teams successfully overcome the challenges caused by the accelerating pace of change in software development, allowing them to build better digital solutions.

Our **Services Teams** work side-by-side with our client’s engineering teams to develop prototypes, proof-of-concepts, production services, and major product enhancements.

Our **Product Teams** leverage our unique vantage point to develop category-defining products that enable our customers’ teams to significantly outperform the competition.

We are currently looking for a **Principal Engineer** or **Technical Director, **based in Guadalajara, to join our engineering discipline and play a key leadership role in building our capabilities in Mexico. In addition, this role will be responsible for the technical leadership of one or more of our premier client engagements and drive the successful execution of our software development projects.

**Role And Responsibilities**

As a Principal at SPAN, your role encompasses a high level of autonomy, influence, and complexity in your work. You would be expected to work under broad direction, often initiating and leading activities. Your responsibilities would include analyzing, designing, planning, executing, and evaluating work to time, cost, and quality targets. You would establish milestones and play a significant role in the assignment of tasks and responsibilities.

Initially leading the definition of goals and objectives for each initiative, then leading the definition of the solution that will deliver the required results. Principal Engineers are responsible for ensuring we deliver business outcomes within budget while maintaining and improving quality. Principal Engineers are all-round, problem solvers, who love to engage clients and other engineers.
- As the most senior member of the engineering discipline in Mexico you will be responsible for growing the engineering team and office to be a peer of our South African office. This will require proven leadership and management skills and is a major career growth opportunity for the right individual.

**Scope of Responsibility**

**Growing Engineers and the Engineering Discipline**
- Principal Engineers are responsible for mentoring engineering staff and providing on the job training. They are expected to contribute to and drive the development of the engineering community at SPAN.

**Engaging Stakeholders**
- Principal Engineers are experienced at engaging clients and customers. They are able to lead the scoping and design discussions and arrive at satisfactory solutions. Principals are able to explain risks and trade-offs and act as a trusted advisor to clients and customers. They collaborate with other teams such as product management, design, and operations to ensure alignment and successful delivery of projects. Effective communication skills are crucial for conveying technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

**Technical Mastery**
- Principal Engineers have experience in all aspects of the product development lifecycle, from inception through design, development, testing, deployment, and support. They can demonstrate working knowledge of a broad range of technical areas and deep expertise in a few. They have excellent problem analysis and solving skills with the ability to innovate and abstract detail into larger patterns and systems. They are responsible for designing and architecting complex systems or components. This involves understanding requirements, considering scalability, performance, security, and other factors, and creating solutions that meet these needs. They may conduct research and experiments to evaluate new tools or approaches that could benefit the organization.

**Leadership**
- Principal Engineers provide leadership by taking responsibility for the technical aspects of major projects or products. They are responsible for overseeing the tasks of our engineers. This oversight involves planning, architecture and design, estimation, resource management, issue resolution and quality assurance.

**Tolerance of Continuous change**
- Principal Engineers thrive in an environment characterized by its fast pace and its high level of collaboration. Principal engineers are typically assigned to multiple projects, and are constantly thinking of the business, and looking for new opportunities within the accounts they look after. They are often responsible for driving continuous improvement initiatives within the engineering organization. This may involve ide