Principal Software Engineer
Listed on 2026-10-18
-
Software Development
Backend Developer, Software Architect, Software Engineer, Cloud Engineer - Software
Principal Software Engineer (Backend / Distributed Systems)
Long Island City, NY | Onsite 4 days/week | Visa sponsorship available
About the company
Venture-backed AI startup in Long Island City building a platform that trains enterprise AI agents on how a business actually works. The product learns from a company’s existing dashboards, code, memos and agent traces so agents can handle complex business tasks accurately, with full lineage back to the source data. Customers include hedge funds, consumer brands and digital asset platforms. The team publishes original research on fine tuning and enterprise reasoning.
The role
This is a hands-on Principal IC role focused on backend and platform architecture. The engineering team is small and very strong, mostly early-career engineers out of MIT and CMU. You’ll be the person setting architectural direction and helping that team level up while still writing a lot of code yourself. It’s not a people management role. There’s room to grow into broader technical leadership as the company scales, if that interests you.
What you’ll do
- Own major architectural decisions across the backend and platform
- Design, build and scale distributed production systems
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
- Work wherever the product needs you, since backend is the focus but this is an early-stage company
What we’re looking for
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, 7+ preferred
- Strong backend and distributed systems background
- Proven ability to design and scale production systems
- Solid CS fundamentals and programming ability
- Comfortable operating with ownership and limited structure
- Startup or product engineering experience preferred. Big Tech backgrounds with strong ownership also work well.
Team
About 9 people today, including software and research engineers.
Compensation
Base salary up to $300,000, plus equity.
Location
Long Island City, NYC. Onsite 4 days a week. Relocation candidates welcome. Visa sponsorship and transfers supported.
(If this job is in fact in your jurisdiction, then you may be using a Proxy or VPN to access this site, and to progress further, you should change your connectivity to another mobile device or PC).