Principal Software Engineer

What You will Do:

The role

As this group's Principal Software Engineer , you will be the "right-hand" of the engineering leader and part of the org's leadership team.

You will be the organization's problem solver. Not an architecture title you hide behind — a coder who jumps into whichever squad is stuck, ships the hard thing, and moves on.

You will jointly own the Platform Architect responsibilities for C1 Platform Foundation. This is a fast-moving train in a startup environment: the tech we build on changes monthly, the plan changes with it, and you thrive on that.

Show-me mentality — your influence comes from the code you ship, demoed on Fridays like everyone else.

What you'll own

The hardest problems in any squad · platform architecture decisions (event bus, plugin lifecycle, multi-tenancy, RBAC, schema registry) jointly with the engineering leader

Pattern-setting reference implementations

Training up the engineers around you — you raise the whole team's level · unblocking, by writing code, not memos.

Who you are

A hacker in the best sense — self-starter, grit, thinks outside the box, loves solving complex problems, likes winning.

You quickly envision code and designs in your head, then prove them by building. You use AI throughout your development workflow

Code generation, refactoring, test scaffolding, debugging — as a genuine velocity multiplier, and you've embedded AI inside products, not just used it as a tool. Change doesn't rattle you; new technology energizes you.

What You Will Bring:

12+ years hands-on, genuinely polyglot — fluent in 7+ languages across your career. Senior-level Go is mandatory; Python and TypeScript expected in the mix; a native/systems language a strong plus.

Breadth across multiple technologies and verticals — you've shipped in more than one industry and more than one architectural era, and adapted fast each time.

Deep understanding of high-capacity distributed systems and their failure physics — state management, race conditions, locking, contention, ordering, back-pressure. You've debugged these in production, not just read about them.

Multiple messaging systems (NATS / Kafka / Redpanda / RabbitMQ-class) and multiple database types and backgrounds — relational, KV, document, columnar, graph — and you know which fits and why.

Two clouds minimum, one deep; GCP strongly preferred as the deep one.

Strong AI knowledge — LLMs, SLMs, RAG, knowledge graphs, agents, training/fine-tuning, eval — and hands-on experience working AI into code: building AI-powered features and using AI-assisted development to move exponentially faster.

Troubleshooting/debugging master — the strongest debugger in the building. Reads unfamiliar code, a stack trace, or a flame graph and sees it. Knows where the breakpoint goes without flailing.

Problem-solves quickly and trains up others as a multiplier — pattern-matches instantly on distributed systems, real-time audio, browser internals, AI pipelines, high-throughput data models.

Floats by choice. Does not want to own a squad. Wants to own the hard 10%.

Sets patterns by shipping the reference implementation, not by writing the doc.