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 requires a technical expert who can drive architectural decisions, leverage AI tools, and partner with product and leadership to shape the direction of the product while building and leading the engineering team over time.

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
• 0-1 build 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