Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Our client is a fast growing series B fintech head quartered in NYC. They are passionate about helping every small business in America.

Responsibilities

• Own full-stack initiatives end to end—from problem definition and architecture to implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Define and execute the technical strategy and roadmap aligned with fast-moving startup goals
• Design and build scalable, secure, and reliable frontend and backend systems with minimal dependencies on other teams.
• Lead development independently while collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders.
• Make pragmatic architecture and technology decisions balancing speed, quality, and long-term scalability.
• Write and review high-impact code across frontend and backend systems
• Identify and solve ambiguous, complex technical problems with limited requirements or constraints.
• Establish lightweight but effective engineering best practices, coding standards, and processes suitable for a startup environment.
• Drive performance, scalability, reliability, and security improvements as the product and user base grow.
• Own production readiness, monitoring, incident response, and post-mortems for the systems you build.
• Author clear technical documentation, RFCs, and architecture decisions to enable future scaling of the team.
• Mentor engineers as the team grows and help set the technical bar for the organization.
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions and lead system migrations or refactors when needed.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with strong full-stack expertise
• Proven ability to independently own and deliver large technical initiatives in startup or high-growth environments
• Expert-level proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript Strong experience with React.js or similar modern frontend frameworks
• Strong backend experience with Node.js and Golang Deep experience with SQL, NoSQL, and in-memory databases, including schema design and performance tuning
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs, GraphQL APIs, and microservices or modular monolith architectures
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and DevOps practices Proficiency with Docker and Kubernetes (or willingness to own production infrastructure directly)
• Experience with event-driven systems and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
• Strong understanding of system design, scalability, and trade-offs in early-stage products
• Excellent problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguity and minimal direction
• Clear and effective communication skills, especially when translating business needs into technical execution
• Experience leading system migrations, refactors, or platform evolution in fast-paced environments

What Success Looks Like

• You independently deliver a critical product or platform initiative with high quality and reliability
• Architecture decisions enable rapid iteration today without blocking future scale
• Engineering velocity improves due to clear ownership, strong technical foundations, and reduced ambiguity
• Production issues are rare, well-understood, and resolved quickly The team looks to you as the technical standard and decision-maker