Principal Software Engineer

Confidential Jobs is an early-stage seed startup seeking a Principal Software Engineer to become the engineering backbone of the company. The role involves owning the architecture end-to-end, driving architectural decisions, and using AI tools to enhance the engineering process while partnering closely with product and leadership.

Responsibilities:

• Become the deepest technical expert on our codebase, touching all surface area, including customer-facing flows
• Drive architectural decisions that balance velocity with durability: the right testing framework, observability stack, and performance posture for a growing product under real load
• Use AI tools aggressively and intelligently, beyond code generation into testing, debugging, and engineering process
• Partner closely with product and leadership to shape what we build, not just how we build it
• Over time, help build and lead the engineering team

Requirements:

• 10–15 years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time at early-stage startups, founding engineer or first few engineers
• Strong TypeScript and React; AWS experience
• You think about testing, observability, and performance as a given, not an afterthought
• You've shipped production systems you're proud of, not just code you've handed off
• AI-native workflow, you use AI tools to move dramatically faster and smarter, not just to autocomplete
• Product minded
• Product intuition: you ask 'should we build this?' before 'how do we build this?'
• Resilient, direct, low-ego, you can handle ambiguity and strong personalities without losing your footing