What should a Principal Front end Engineer do?

First I would talk to your manager about their expectations. They might not have a clear idea either, but you should see what they say.

As general advice — as a principal engineer, similar to a staff engineer[0], your role is really to look ahead and solve the next problem. What isn't a huge issue now, but will be in 18 months time? Where are the companies projects moving? Can you predict that they're going to need particular support in the future?

[0] https://staffeng.com/

Are you a principal engineer or the principal engineer?

If you are a principal engineer, they might've just used the title to try to recruit someone who isn't a novice.

Either way, if you want to assume a leadership position, just start doing shit. Especially if they're not giving you stuff to do, just start taking the initiative. Are tests set up? Do they use Storyboard for components? Set that up, or create new ones. Do they have Cypress or equivalent e2e? Do they have Jest or equivalent snapshots?

Stay calm, use moderate language, collect paychecks.

I have found myself in a similar role and lead a team that spends most of our time improving the front-end build tools and front-end testing infrastructure that all teams in the company use and splitting the company's codebase into micro-frontends where it makes sense.

Depending on the company and product, it might make sense to focus on performance or building a shared component library. In our case, the average team's productivity was far below where I believe it should be because of dull tools. Figure out where your company needs improvement the most and make it better.

If you have the leverage, 17 people in daily standups is a good problem to fix.

Discover what the companies pain points are. What the customers pain points are. What the blockers are.

Is there any elephants in the room being ignored?

It’s also quite possible they just wanted a feature jock that won’t mess things up. Perhaps that’s what is actually needed.

In most large companies the title Principle is the top rung for engineers aside from something like Senior Scientist that requires post doctoral education or something amazing that changes the direction of a company’s technology.

As a principal your primary job is to be an engineering executive. That means making decisions, studying, and advising executives/planners, and directing the path of technology.

As a front end principal you need to find the shortest path to accomplish the business goals with front end technology. The biggest challenge is that junior engineers, especially on the front end, need tremendous hand holding and resist outside a small comfort zone. That is a challenge because as a principal you set technology direction instead of holding people’s hands, which is the job of their managers.

If as a principal you are too aggressive in your pursuit of product quality you will be sidelined and ignored. If you are too lax you won’t offer any value for your high compensation. This where soft skills become important. Set the bar high, communicate the importance of high standards in terms of money, and get buy-in from senior leadership.

> What should I do?

Document where the current product/process sucks and recommend a radical order of magnitude improvement. Write that clearly for stupid people but include strong evidence for your case. Get buy-in from those that are in a position to care about making/saving money. You don’t have to win the support of resistant junior developers if you make a strong business case. Then oversee the successful implementation and be planning the next big challenge.

I've often found that getting work to do after starting a new job is surprisingly difficult.

My suggestion is to find out what your manager is doing... and try to do it for them. Or otherwise, do this with some other people in your team.

Possible outcomes are that they'll be happy, or they might say "no, don't do that, do this instead!".

Talk to people. You should be asking these questions to your direct management. They clearly don't have a great onboarding process (even more difficult if you're remote) so you'll need to do some extra work to stay on top of things and figure out how your role fits within the team and the company.

I once had a job that forgot about me in a large corporate environment. After about a month of showing up to stare at a wall I just stopped showing up.

I used that time to job hunt on the clock and ended up collecting my salary for a few months at the other place.

Start doing code review on the more junior front end devs.

I'd be happy to talk to you about by next startup.