Senior Architect — Full-Stack, Cloud & AI Leader

Austin, United States | Posted on 05/22/2026

Principal Engineer — Full Stack, Cloud & AI

Location: Remote —Austin, TX preferred | Fly-in 3–4 days twice monthly

Type: 6-Month Contract-to-Hire |
Conversion: Full-time upon mutual agreement | Relocation to Austin expected at conversion

Reports To: President& CEO

Compensation: $90–$110/hr contract |
Conversion: $160,000–$185,000 base + performance bonus + equity

Pandesco is a boutique MSP andSaaS technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, serving specialty,luxury retail, and consumer products clients. We build proprietary software and deliver managed services that help our clients modernize, operate efficiently,and grow. We are a small, fast-moving team where everyone is a builder andevery contribution is visible.

We are entering a critical growth phase — our platform is in active development targeting commercial release within the year, and we need a principal-level engineer to own the technical architecture and lead the development team through it.

The Role

This is not a review-and-approve role. You will be the most senior technical individual contributor at Pandesco— designing systems, writing production code, setting engineering standards forthe entire organization, and making the architectural calls that determine howwe build.

You will lead and direct the developer team, onshore and offshore, while remaining deeply hands-on yourself.

You will work in close partnership with the President & CEO, who serves asproduct owner, and with the Director of Technical Architecture on platform and infrastructure alignment.

AI is not a future consideration at Pandesco — it is embedded in how we build today. You must be an active,enthusiastic user of AI in your day-to-day development work. Candidates who are resistant to or uncomfortable with AI-assisted development will not be a fit,regardless of their technical credentials. We expect our Principal Engineer tobe extending and advancing our AI capabilities, not catching up to them.

If you are an architect who has drifted away from the keyboard and wants to stay in management, this is notyour role. If you are a builder who thinks at the system level, owns decision send-to-end, and is energized by greenfield platform work — this was written foryou.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture of Pandesco's Saa Splatform — design, implement, and evolve it as the product scales toward commercial release.

• Write production code daily — .NET (C#) backend, Reactfrontend, Azure services, data pipelines.

• Set and enforce engineering standards across all Pandesco engineering teams, onshore and offshore.

• Lead, mentor, and direct the developer team — code reviews, architecture reviews, technical direction.

• Design and implement multi-tenant SaaS systems withRBAC and SBAC patterns.

• Integrate AI-powered capabilities into the platform —LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, agentic AI workflows, and MCP-based architectures.

• Integrate Azure Key Vault, managed identities, andsecure coding practices into every system you build.

• Assess engineering team composition and make recommendations on LATAM team structure and hiring.

• Produce clear architecture documentation — diagrams,API specs, ADRs, runbooks, and handoff guides.

• Fly in to Austin 3–4 days twice monthly for collaborative design sessions, team building, and client-facing work.

Required Qualifications

• AI-forward mindset — you actively use AI tools in your development workflow and have strong opinions about how to apply them effectively. Resistance to AI is disqualifying.

• 10+ years of professional software development with demonstrated architect-level decision making.

• .NET / C# — production-grade API and…