Principal Product Engineer - Evinova

Pragmatic Builder-Architect

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.

You will embed with a product team for extended periods, owning technical direction and building AI-powered features end-to-end — from idea through production. You won't just advise; you'll build, and what you build will set the pattern for others. You may end up managing some engineers.

Most engineers lean one way. "Hackers" ship fast but accrue debt; "architects" build clean abstractions but stall on delivery. You are both. You know when to prototype loosely and when to invest in the durable version — and you can articulate why.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

Engineering Judgment

• 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.

AI Engineering

• 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.

Working with Teams

• 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.

Learning

• 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.

Technical Environment

• 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…