Principal Product Engineer - Evinova

The Role

We are looking for a pragmatic builder-architect — a senior engineer who ships fast without leaving a mess, and makes architectural choices that hold up as the product scales. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role: roughly 40% writing code and prototyping, with the remainder spent on architecture, mentoring, and raising the engineering bar within your team.

• Design and build AI-powered product features — agent architectures, RAG pipelines, model orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails — with the same engineering rigor as any production system: testable, observable, gracefully degrading.

• Own the full stack for the features you build — application code, data, infrastructure — making end‑to‑end decisions about deployment, observability, cost, and security.

• Make architectural choices that optimize for reversibility early and durability when the problem is actually understood.

• Mentor and coach engineers on your team, transferring judgment and mental models, not just answers. Calibrate involvement to stakes: get out of the way for cheap‑to‑reverse work, lean in for load‑bearing decisions.

• Read existing systems as accumulated knowledge before treating them as debt. Understand why things are shaped the way they are before proposing changes.

• Identify and manage the blast radius of technical decisions — the dangerous ones at this level aren’t bad deployments, they’re bad directions.

• You think in failure modes and second‑order effects, not happy paths and demos. “Who inherits this, and what does it cost them if I’m wrong?” is a question you ask naturally.

• You optimize for sustainability — testability, clear boundaries, sane defaults, documentation — so what you build can be owned and extended by others.

• You treat constraints as the design problem. You map what’s frozen, what’s validated, what other systems depend on, and what can’t take downtime before proposing solutions.

• You have built and shipped AI-powered features in production — not just used AI tooling for personal productivity.

• You treat AI systems as engineering problems: versioned, evaluated, observable, and designed to degrade gracefully when models behave unexpectedly.

• You use AI as a force multiplier on judgment you already have — it accelerates the parts you understand well, precisely because you can evaluate the output.

• You use AI to compress the learning loop, not skip it. You build real mental models of new technology, using AI as an accelerant, not a crutch.

• You transfer judgment, not just answers. You surface reasoning, install mental models, and make yourself progressively less necessary.

• You lead through demonstrated competence, not positional authority — and you know that doing the work yourself is sometimes the failure mode.

• You learn the team’s context, constraints, and history before injecting opinions. You earn trust by understanding what came before.

• You learn to a depth proportional to the decision. Evaluating something? Defensible opinion, move on. Committing the product to it? Deep enough to understand failure modes and sharp edges.

• When you pick up new technology, you’re trying to understand why it works the way it does and what problem its designers were solving — because that’s what transfers.

Our stack spans the following. We don’t expect mastery of all of it — but given the role, you should be able to pick up almost any of it quickly.

• Cloud: AWS (primary) — architecture and infrastructure

• Front-end: React, Type Script, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Block Note, Nginx

• Back-end: Node.js, Next.js, Python, Kafka, FastAPI, Dramatiq + Valkey (task queue), PynamoDB (single‑table DynamoDB), SQL Alchemy async + asyncpg (PostgreSQL), Prometheus, MongoDB

• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), AWS CDK (Type Script), ECS Fargate, DynamoDB, S3, RDS, Elasticache Valkey, Bedrock, Secrets Manager, SSM

• Dev Ops: NX, pnpm, Git Hub Actions, GHCR, Docker/Buildx, Wiz, Git Hub OIDC

• AI Infrastructure: Google ADK, LiteLLM, Open Router, Bedrock (KB, BDA, Guardrails), MCP, Langfuse + Open Telemetry, RAGAS, specialist domain…