Principal Software Engineer

About Vanta

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, empowering companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team; while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it.

Vanta’s team and technology surface are growing quickly, and it’s essential that we invest in the right abstractions and systems to enable us to scale with our business. Our business has found incredible product-market fit and has monetized effectively since the day we signed our first customer. We’re growing at a blistering pace, which presents career-defining opportunities for engineers to accelerate their growth and contribute to a rapidly-scaling company.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll identify key engineering-wide, org-level strategic technical initiatives and set the tone for overall engineering excellence and culture. This role focuses on our Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) product, which helps customers scale their GRC programs with streamlined workflows, AI, and continuous control monitoring. We are revolutionizing the way customers operate their programs through collaboration, audit experience, personnel compliance, reporting, and IT risk.

Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog to learn more about what our team is working on!

Please note we are only able to hire in Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia.

What You'll Do as a Principal Software Engineer at Vanta

• Identify and solve complex, high-impact problems, leading projects with multiple cross-functional stakeholders, engineering leaders, and engineers to deliver significant impact to our business.
• Set technical direction impacting our entire engineering team, from critical systems and core product abstractions to developer productivity, and hold a high bar for quality across engineering.
• Design, develop, and own new product functionality and/or infrastructure leveraging modern frameworks and tooling (TypeScript, React, Node.js). Work on deeply ambiguous problem areas, and will tackle larger, more long-term challenges for the company.
• Design, develop, and own new product functionality and infrastructure leveraging modern frameworks and tooling (TypeScript, Terraform, Node.js).
• Make effective tradeoffs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation.
• Act as a cultural beacon, setting an example for effective, collaborative engineering and helping mentor junior team members.

How to Be Successful in This Role

• Have played significant technical leadership roles for bigger organizations and complex projects.
• Had a good balance of customer focus, bias for action, and balancing between right long-term, medium-term, and short-term decisions.
• Have experience communicating with and working closely with a large set of cross-functional stakeholders.
• Have upleveled teams of engineers, mentoring and leading by example.
• You are a self-starter and have a mix of previous startup experience and working at scale experience, and in an environment that prioritizes a bias for action.
• You have experience building architectural changes whose impact span is multi-year, or have experience going very deep in technology and becoming an expert.
• Have an interest in learning about security or prior experience in the space.
• Experience working at rapidly scaling startups and large companies with environments that prioritize a a bias for action.
• Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact.

What You Can Expect as a Vanta'n in Canada

• Industry-competitive salary and equity.
• 100% covered medical, dental, and vision benefits with dependents coverage.
• Pension contribution.
• 16 weeks fully paid Parental Leave for all new parents.
• Health & wellness stipend.
• Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend.
• Flexible work hours and location.
• 21 days of Vacation Time and 80 hours of Sick Leave.
• 11 company-paid holidays.
• Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events!
• Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Sydney.

About Vanta

We started in 2018, in the wake of several high-profile data breaches. Online security was only becoming more important, but we knew firsthand how hard it could be for fast-growing companies to invest the time and manpower it takes to build a solid security foundation. Vanta was inspired by a vision to restore trust in internet businesses by enabling companies to improve and prove their security. From our early days automating security monitoring for compliance standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 to creating the world's leading Trust Management Platform, our vision remains unchanged.

Now more than ever, making security continuous—not just a point-in-time check— is essential. Thousands of companies rely on Vanta to build, maintain, and demonstrate their trust— all in a way that's real-time and transparent.

Key skills/competency

• Technical Leadership
• System Design
• Software Architecture
• TypeScript
• React
• Node.js
• GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance)
• Stakeholder Management
• Mentorship
• Problem Solving