Principal Software Engineer & Team Lead

Title: Principal Software Engineer & Team Lead

Start Date: Immediate

Position Type: Contract/ Full-time Employment

Location: Remote across USA

 

About the Role

We are building an infrastructure management platform from scratch—and we need a Principal Engineer who writes code, not just designs systems. You will build the core control plane in Typescript & Go: reconciliation loops, declarative APIs, state machines, and the primitives that make infrastructure programmable. You will also own the developer-facing frontend in TypeScript and Next.js. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will ship production code daily, own critical subsystems end-to-end, and set the technical bar for the team.

 

Key Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer and team lead, you will:

• Own architecture and system design for core platform services, ensuring they meet reliability, security, compliance, and performance requirements.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of critical platform capabilities, from technical discovery and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing improvements.
• Drive technical excellence in the codebase, setting standards for code quality, testing, performance, and observability, and ensuring they are adopted across the team.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers, providing clear technical direction, constructive feedback, and opportunities for ownership.
• Collaborate with product, platform, and security leaders to translate business needs into technical roadmaps, and make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, safety, and maintainability.
• Continuously improve platform operability, including deployment strategies, telemetry and alerting, incident response practices, and post-incident learning.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks, proactively addressing scaling, reliability, and security concerns before they impact customers.

 

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in senior/staff/principal roles shipping production systems.
• Expert-level TypeScript proficiency—you can build complex, type-safe applications and reason deeply about the type system.
• Expert-level Next.js experience building production full-stack applications with SSR, API routes, and modern React patterns.
• Strong Go experience for backend services, CLIs, and systems-level tooling.
• Deep expertise in API design—RESTful APIs, versioning, error handling, and building interfaces developers love to use.
• Experience building control planes, reconciliation loops, or state machines for infrastructure automation.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles and how to design for eventual consistency and failure.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Proven ability to own and deliver complex systems end-to-end, from design through production operation.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising the bar for code quality.
• Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or CLIs that other engineers depend on.
• Strong opinions on testing, observability, and building systems that are easy to debug and operate.

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or developer tooling projects.
• Experience building multi-tenant platforms with tenant isolation and resource management.
• Deep PostgreSQL experience—schema design, query optimization, and handling high-write workloads.
• Background with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Kafka, NATS, etc.).
• Experience designing secure systems with RBAC, secrets management, and compliance requirements.
• Performance engineering skills—profiling and optimizing Go and TypeScript applications.
• Prior experience at infrastructure or developer tools companies.

 

What We're Looking For

• You write code that others learn from and have strong opinions on building maintainable systems.
• You understand how infrastructure works and use that knowledge to build robust platforms.
• You obsess over API design and developer experience.
• You reason about distributed systems holistically and design for operability from day one.
• You raise the bar for engineering quality and mentor engineers to grow.
• You've shipped complex systems and know what it takes to go from design to production