Principal Software Engineer

Our client, an early-stage, venture-backed AI Startup, is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to join the team remotely on an initial 12-month contract. The successful candidate will work closely with the technical co-founder to strengthen the platform’s architecture, expand engineering capacity and prepare the product for production., * Evaluate the existing codebase, system architecture and key technical decisions.

• Partner closely with the technical co-founder to prepare the platform for its initial production release.
• Design, build and maintain reliable backend services using Rust and Java.
• Develop high-performance proxy, gateway and networking capabilities for managing AI traffic.
• Enhance the platform’s performance, consistency, scalability and maintainability.
• Build robust observability, monitoring, logging and cost-management capabilities.
• Identify and address architectural risks ahead of deployments with design partners.
• Review, test and refactor AI-assisted code produced using tools such as Claude and Codex.
• Introduce pragmatic engineering standards across testing, documentation and code quality.
• Shape the long-term technical architecture as the company progresses from pre-commercial development to customer deployments.

• Significant software engineering experience at Principal, Staff or Senior Staff level.
• Deep expertise in backend engineering and distributed systems architecture.
• Hands-on experience building proxies, gateways, networking infrastructure or high-performance data-processing systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend programming language, ideally Rust or Java.
• Experience designing, deploying and operating production infrastructure on AWS.
• A strong understanding of system reliability, scalability, latency and performance optimization.
• The ability to assess an early-stage codebase and implement pragmatic architectural improvements.
• Experience working within startups, innovation teams or similarly fast-moving and lightly structured environments.
• The confidence to work independently while collaborating closely with a technical co-founder.
• Familiarity with AI infrastructure, model gateways, observability or FinOps is a plus.