Principal Engineer

ABOUT HARBORLAB

Founded in 2020 in Greece, Harbor Lab is a fast-growing B2B maritime tech company on a mission to simplify and optimize port cost management. Our end-to-end,
AI-powered SaaS platform
transforms how Shipowners and Shipmanagers handle Disbursement Accounts (DAs), bringing automation, real-time data, control and transparency to one of the most complex and costly parts of global shipping.

But we don’t stop there. Harbor Lab also powers a thriving
Marketplace
, connecting Principals with a global network of vetted Port Agents and Vendors.

At Harbor Lab,
people come first
. Our culture is anchored in ambition, trustworthiness, genuine care, and agility—values we bring to every interaction with our customers and our team. We're proud to be consistently recognized as a Best Workplace (2021, 2022, 2023) and certified as a Great Place to Work (2024, 2025, 2026).

If you're looking to make a global impact, grow alongside passionate peers, and shape the future of maritime innovation—we’d love to meet you.

Harbor Lab builds the platform that shipping companies and port agents use to plan, approve and settle port calls, disbursement accounts, husbandry expenses, appointments, and the integrations that connect them to fleet management systems. Our product works, our customers depend on it daily, and our engineering teams ship a steady roadmap.

What we haven't done efficiently is invest in the platform underneath: paying down technical debt, modernising pipelines and observability, and adopting AI-assisted development seriously. We're fixing that structurally. Delivery and people management now sit with our three feature-team leads. This role owns technical excellence, and nothing else. It's a senior individual-contributor position with no direct reports, reporting directly to our CTO as its own engineering unit, alongside our three feature teams.

• Own the technical roadmap, debt reduction, reliability, pipelines, observability, AI-assisted development, with quarterly outcomes, defended in the same forum as the product roadmap. This is hands-on: you write the code.
• Review the product roadmap each quarter, de-risk the technically risky parts before a team starts building, and set technical standards that live in the code and pipeline, not a wiki.
• Raise our monitoring, alerting, SLOs and incident response maturity, and act as the escalation tier for production.
• Take our early agentic workflows (Jira-triggered Claude Code, automated review) and make them reliable on a real codebase, and shape what AI tooling we adopt across engineering.
• Own the technical reality behind our security audits, and know where our performance and cost headroom is.
• Mentor our senior engineers, sit on every engineering hiring loop, and be the advocate for platform health.
• What you won't do: manage people, take on feature work to rescue a slipping sprint, or architect from a distance.

• 10+ years of software development experience, including 3+ years at Staff/Principal level or as the most senior technical voice in an engineering organisation.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and running microservices in a strongly typed backend language.
• Real experience with event-driven systems and relational databases at scale, including SQL and performance work.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on Kubernetes in a public cloud and managing infrastructure as code.
• A track record of measurably improving CI/CD, monitoring and release workflows, not just proposing improvements.
• Working knowledge of SLOs, error budgets and incident management.
• Daily use of AI tools in your own development work, with a clear point of view on where they help, where they don't, and how you…