The RealReal is the world’s largest online marketplace for authenticated, consigned luxury goods. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help us solve some of our toughest and most interesting challenges as we continue to scale. Reporting directly to our VP of Engineering, this is a spanning role that will affect multiple areas of the business.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll spend about 40% of your time on architecture, mentoring, thought leadership, and guiding teams around the company as they establish or update best practices for software development. You’ll participate in guild (community of practice) meetings, architecture review sessions, organize training for engineers, and otherwise help ensure that we maintain a cohesive and modern technology vision while still empowering teams to move fast. You’ll partner with senior technical leadership to establish north stars of our technology vision. You’ll represent the company at conferences and other speaking engagements from time to time.

With the other 60% of your time, you’ll dive in and actively develop that future! You’ll typically start the work on some of our most challenging projects, laying out the foundational architecture and actively contributing code. In most cases, you’ll bring in other engineers from around the company as these initiatives grow, eventually handing it off to Staff Engineers as you go to tackle the next challenge.

• Propose and build technical architecture and solutions to move our business forward.


• Advise and collaborate with senior engineering leadership on technical vision and strategy across a multi-year timeframe.


• Build a deep understanding of The RealReal’s business model, opportunities, and challenges.


• Provide technical direction and mentorship for engineers across the organization.


• Drive build vs buy evaluations, including research and initial assessment with vendors.


• Assist in coordinating cross-team engineering efforts and determining technical requirements.


• Review technical architecture proposals and pull requests and provide constructive feedback.


• Produce high-quality, performant, testable code, and systems.


• Document architecture and processes, and uplevel them across the company.


• Represent the company at conferences and other events, helping us to build brand awareness and attract talent.

Minimum Work Experience:

• 12+ years of professional web application/full-stack development experience.


• 2+ years leading a high-performance engineering team or organization, in a fast-paced environment.


• Fluency with any of Ruby, Elixir, Erlang, or another object-oriented or functional programming language.


• Strong understanding of distributed systems and architecture.


• Strong understanding of web technologies: HTML5, Javascript, CSS/SASS, REST, JSON.


• Strong understanding of web-app performance fundamentals and related dev tools.


• Strong database fundamentals and experience with MySql or PostgreSQL.


• Experience using async message queues such as Kafka or Kinesis.