Thanks

Principal Engineer

Thanks

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇦🇺 Australia

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Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

Distributed SystemsJavaScriptNext.jsNode.jsReactReact NativeTypeScript

About the role

  • Ad fatigue is killing engagement, but we're fixing it. Thanks (thanks.co) is building the world's first customer-first ad network, an advertising platform that delights consumers instead of just targeting them.
  • Seeking a Principal Engineer to design and scale this platform; senior technical leadership role working with founders, CTO, and product/engineering teams to shape technical strategy, solve complex challenges, and mentor others while remaining hands-on.
  • Shape system architecture and guide technical strategy – contribute to long-term design decisions, advocate for scalability, reliability, and security across our stack, and help drive pragmatic tradeoffs aligned with business needs.
  • Lead complex initiatives – break down ambiguous problems, scope complex projects, and shepherd them from idea to production.
  • Raise the technical bar – champion engineering excellence in design, code quality, testing, performance, and developer productivity.
  • Mentor and influence – provide technical guidance to senior engineers, foster growth across the team, and help establish a strong engineering culture.
  • Lead by example – design and build critical features and infrastructure across the stack, setting examples of best practices in action.
  • Cross-functional leadership – partner closely with product, design, and leadership to shape roadmaps, evaluate trade-offs, and ensure technical alignment with company vision.
  • Scale operations – help define processes, observability, and reliability practices that keep our systems performant and resilient as we grow.

Requirements

  • Extensive experience with modern TypeScript / Node.js platforms and strong proficiency across the stack.
  • Proven track record of architecting and scaling distributed systems in production.
  • Deep expertise in system design, performance, reliability, and security.
  • Strong judgment in balancing speed vs. quality, with an ability to cut through ambiguity.
  • Clear, persuasive communicator who can influence across teams and functions.
  • A history of technical leadership – mentoring engineers, guiding teams, and raising standards.
  • Ownership mindset – you proactively drive initiatives from vision to execution.
  • Collaborative and humble – you uplift those around you and lead with empathy.
  • Experience in adtech or martech (ad serving, ranking, attribution, audience targeting, DSPs, etc.).
  • Knowledge of Cloudflare ecosystem (Workers, Queues, KV, etc.).
  • Familiarity with SRE practices and operating large-scale systems.
  • Nice to have: Experience with analytics and data platforms such as ClickHouse or other OLAP systems.