Blue River Technology is a team of innovators focused on creating intelligent machinery for various industries. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the development of backend systems and APIs for their robotics and machine learning platform, enabling efficient deployment of intelligent systems at scale.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power robotics and ML workflows
- Develop developer-facing applications and tools (UI + backend) for model training, evaluation, debugging, and data exploration
- Own service architecture, performance, scalability, and maintainability across critical systems
- Translate complex workflows into intuitive, reliable, and high-performing software systems
- Own and drive technical vision and architecture for backend systems and applications
- Serve as technical lead for large, cross-functional initiatives
- Mentor and guide Senior and Staff Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions
- Establish engineering best practices for backend development, system design, and code quality
- Partner closely with ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Robotics Engineers, and Product teams
- Enable faster experimentation and iteration by building robust, user-centric developer tools
- Clearly communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, and architecture to stakeholders
- Ensure services are production-ready, observable, and reliable
- Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams on deployment, monitoring, and scaling strategies
- Contribute to data workflows and pipelines where needed to support application use cases
- Get hands-on to unblock teams and solve complex technical challenges
- Lead delivery of high-impact initiatives from design through production
- Apply a customer-first mindset to ensure solutions drive meaningful impact
Requirements:
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at the Staff or Principal level
- Strong expertise in backend engineering and distributed systems design
- Proven experience building scalable APIs and backend services in production environments
- Experience developing full-stack applications (backend + frontend)
- Strong programming experience in Python (or similar backend languages)
- Experience with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React)
- Solid understanding of system design, scalability, and performance optimization
- Experience with databases (e.g., Postgres, MongoDB, or similar)
- Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS or similar)
- Experience working with data-intensive systems or workflows
- Strong architectural judgment and problem-solving skills
- Excellent communication and collaboration abilities
- Experience building systems that support machine learning, computer vision, or robotics workflows
- Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling and experimentation workflows
- Experience designing internal tools or developer platforms
- Exposure to data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Airflow, or similar)
- Experience with C++ in performance-critical or robotics-adjacent systems
- Strong focus on developer experience (DX)
- Experience influencing technical direction across teams