Principal Engineer

CampusIQ | North Austin, TX | Hybrid | Full-time

At a glance

Location North Austin, TX. Hybrid.

Type Full-time. This is a building job. You will not manage a team.

The team Twenty-one people. Four engineers. You would be the fifth.

Compensation $180–240K + equity

AI is how you build here, not what you build.

This is a building job. You will not manage a team.

We're probably not looking for the best engineer we can find.

A year ago we published a claim with no proof behind it. The best people at AI-native development wouldn't be engineers. They'd be former engineering managers — people who spent years learning what "done" looks like, who made peace with the fact that their value was never in typing.

Then we tested it. Same assignment to senior engineers, junior engineers, and managers.

The managers won. One of them hadn't written production code in years. He's now the number one contributor at this company.

That's the job we're hiring for.

If you run a team today and miss building, this is about you. You didn't stop being a builder. You just stopped getting to.

We tell universities how their space is actually used, from the Wi‑Fi network they already own. No new sensors.

One large public university thought its buildings were 97% occupied. Only 38% were filled. Another avoided $8M in construction because the data disagreed with the plan.

Twenty-one people. Four engineers. You'd be the fifth.

We turned feature delivery into a production line. You draft the work once; the line builds it and ships it. (That's the machine  run v0.8 today, and we'll show you exactly where the seams are.)

You'd build the rest of the line. New products are coming, and the line that has to carry them doesn't exist yet. That's yours.

Here's the day: decide what gets built, scope it so a machine can execute it, catch it when the output is wrong, ship. The typing is the machine's problem.

Roughly eighty percent of the craft happens before any code is generated. That part is human, and it's the constraint on everything else.

You get an outcome, not a queue.

Nobody hands you the steps. When you don't know how to get there, the answer is go figure it out — and you won't be punished for that being hard.

You'd be paired with someone from the business side. Neither of you manages the other. Both of you ship.

We don't need someone who punches tickets. I give you a ticket, you give me a PR was never much of a skill, and it isn't one now. That job is gone here, and we'd rather say so than let you find out in month two.

We need people who can tell the difference between "I build software that uses AI" and "I use AI to build software."

Those aren't the same skill and only one of them is this job. If your experience is shipping ML features, that's real work — and it's not this job.

Strong senior engineers are welcome to apply. Our honest worry is scope. This job is accountable for outcomes, not tickets, and most careers on the IC track never required that.

Here are the numbers, because you'll be measured on them and hiding them would be unfair.

• Tokens per day. Are you actually in the tool? Roughly $80 a day is the floor. It's the fastest honest signal that exists.
• Pull requests per day. Not a target to maximize — a threshold. It tells us whether you've crossed into working a new way, or you're doing the old thing slightly faster. A step change is the signal. A percentage improvement means nothing has changed yet.
• Business outcomes. Where it actually settles.

Then, later, the one that matters most:
when you build something other people on the team start using.

For context on the second number: engineers here each sustain 75+…