Principal Engineer

A Place for Mom is building the next generation of intelligent, scalable platforms that connect families, providers, and advisors through AI-driven experiences. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical design and evolution of their full-stack platform, ensuring high performance and innovation across web, data, and communication systems.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and evolve core platform systems spanning frontend, backend, and data services, balancing performance, extensibility, and security
• Design scalable, event-driven architectures that integrate APIs, conversational interfaces, and data pipelines across products
• Lead full-stack engineering strategy across Next.js, NestJS, TypeScript, and Node.js, ensuring alignment on quality, standards, and maintainability
• Build AI-native solutions that embed intelligence and automation throughout our platform, partnering closely with Data, ML, and Product teams to translate models and insights into production-ready features
• Stay ahead of the evolving AI ecosystem, evaluating new frameworks, model interfaces, and development best practices, and championing their responsible adoption across the engineering organization
• Advance platform observability and reliability through instrumentation, alerting, and automation, owning SLAs, Web Vitals, and uptime goals
• Partner across disciplines to align technical decisions with product strategy, ensuring the platform supports AI, analytics, and experimentation needs
• Mentor senior engineers and influence architectural direction across teams, fostering a culture of learning, documentation, and accountability

Requirements:

• 14+ years of software engineering experience with modern JavaScript/TypeScript stacks (React, Next.js, Node.js, NestJS)
• Proven ability to architect and scale distributed, service-oriented systems with strong attention to performance and maintainability
• Deep understanding of API design, event streaming (Redis/Kafka), and real-time communication systems
• Experience with relational databases (Postgres) and data-driven service design; familiarity with GraphQL or REST service layers
• Track record of building and integrating complex web platforms that combine front-end, back-end, and data systems into unified experiences
• Excellent communicator able to explain complex technical concepts clearly across audiences from engineers to executives
• Demonstrated leadership in defining engineering standards, mentoring senior talent, and driving architectural strategy
• Exposure to AI/ML-integrated products or large-scale personalization systems
• Familiarity with data lake and analytics platforms (Databricks, Fivetran, PostHog, or similar)
• Experience with real-time communication APIs (Twilio, Customer.io) and event-driven microservices
• Background in multi-tenant SaaS or high-volume consumer platforms
• Contributions to engineering communities or open-source frameworks