Principal Product Engineer

Coforma is a remote-first company focused on responsible innovation and ethical technology. They are seeking a Principal Product Engineer to lead the development of new digital services in their innovation lab, focusing on frontend architecture and mentoring engineers to create scalable and maintainable applications.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as technical lead for early-stage innovation lab projects, working closely with the CINO and our Product, Design, and Delivery teams to shape technical direction for prototypes and new products and guiding design and implementation decisions
• Mentor engineers and collaborators, sharing best practices and fostering a culture of collaboration, psychological safety, and continuous learning in an agile, experiment-friendly environment
• Enable modern DevSecOps practices such as automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and secure-by-default engineering
• Participate in business development and strategy efforts (proposals, presentations, etc.), when needed
• Rapidly prototype, validate, and iterate on new product ideas, balancing speed of learning with scalable, maintainable code
• Select and implement modern frameworks (React/TypeScript, Node, Python, etc.) and cloud services (containerized APIs, event-driven services, etc.) that enable fast experimentation
• Identify and mitigate technical risks early; clearly communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• Support experimentation with AI-driven capabilities (LLMs, data pipelines, agentic tools) where appropriate
• Contribute reusable libraries, documentation, and internal tools that accelerate future innovation lab projects
• Partner with IT and Security teams to ensure prototypes run in sandboxed, compliant environments suitable for R&D
• Complete new hire orientation training and familiarize yourself with the vision for the innovation lab
• Define the initial platform architecture including portal entry point, identity/auth approach, multi-tenant strategy, API gateway, and service boundaries
• Select foundational technologies (frameworks, languages, hosting environment, auth provider or build approach, database pattern)
• Create architecture diagrams and engineering decision records to align with leadership and product direction
• Stand up the initial repo structure, monorepo or polyrepo approach, and foundational CI/CD pipeline skeleton
• Begin coding the Platform Shell / Portal (even if just a Hello World + placeholder UI)
• Implement a basic working authentication flow (prototype only) to validate feasibility
• Review existing ideas in Linear and select one to implement as the first platform module and collaborate with the existing engineer to break down and begin implementation
• Partner with the Product Operations Manager to define agile development workflows and engineering rituals
• Begin documenting platform principles such as modularity, API-first, secure-by-default, and observability-ready
• Deliver a functional login experience connected to cloud infrastructure
• Implement the first platform module from Linear using the new architecture
• Establish patterns/templates for reusable services or modules
• Deploy the platform scaffold into a development environment with automated deploys
• Refine sprint practices, backlog structure, and definition of done with the Product Operations Manager
• Begin mentoring engineers on using the platform architecture and process
• Produce a platform roadmap and demonstrate the platform to leadership, articulating how additional features/products will plug into the foundation
• Deliver a working platform with authentication, portal access, and at least one production-ready module
• Establish guidelines for engineers joining the platform effort (documentation, contribution models, code conventions, etc.)
• Enable rapid module creation through established templates and tooling
• Establish early success metrics for delivery velocity, platform adoption, and code quality

Requirements:

• Minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience in product-oriented environments, with a strong frontend focus
• Deep hands-on experience building production applications in Next.js, including modern React patterns, App Router, and TypeScript
• Strong backend experience in Node.js, with preference for NestJS, and comfort owning API design end-to-end
• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and consuming APIs including GraphQL and REST, and deploying to modern cloud environments (preferably GCP)
• Proven track record of shipping full-stack web applications from prototype to production, with particular strength in frontend architecture, performance, and developer experience
• 4+ years of experience leading technical direction or serving as tech lead/architect on complex products
• Deep experience with React/TypeScript and at least one modern back-end stack (Node, Python, Go, etc.)
• Proven track record of shipping full-stack web apps from prototype to production
• Comfortable operating in startup-style ambiguity, designing experiments, measuring outcomes, and iterating quickly based on real user feedback
• Full-time resident of the contiguous United States (must be legally authorized to work in the US now and in the future without sponsorship)
• Strong grasp of the building blocks of the web (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSON, TLS/SSL), with particular depth in modern frontend application architecture
• Deep experience with React and Next.js, including routing, data fetching patterns, performance optimization, and building resilient, user-centric UIs that interact cleanly with APIs
• Solid backend engineering fundamentals, with hands-on experience building cloud-native Node.js services (preferably NestJS), including API design (GraphQL preferred), data modeling, and service boundaries
• Practical experience implementing secure authentication and authorization flows (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML), and designing APIs that are safe to consume from browser-based clients
• Familiarity with event-driven and asynchronous processing, distributed caching, observability and logging, and modern persistence patterns that support frontend-driven product experiences
• Capable of delivering application architectures and code that are highly scalable, available, and performant
• Understanding of security and compliance implications (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP) for SaaS-style products and ability to design with them in mind
• Skilled at tailoring technical communication for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders and able to explain complex trade-offs in plain language to influence decisions and align teams