Principal Engineer

Description Remote **Must reside in Colorado, Utah, or Florida** Our client seeks a hands-on Principal Engineer to shape the future of its customer onboarding platform while remaining engaged in daily coding. The role requires driving architectural decisions, leading technical innovation, building proofs of concept, influencing product strategy, and partnering with Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and Sales to embed AI capabilities across the platform and solve complex customer challenges. The engineer will join a team of approximately ten and serve as a key technical voice influencing the organization’s direction. This is a contract to hire opportunity. Applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis and convert to FTE following contract duration. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance. Rate: $90.00 to $100.00/hr. w2 JN -092026-108729 Responsibilities Define and drive architectural direction across the platform. Make strategic technical decisions impacting scalability, reliability, security, and future product innovation. Guide platform evolution while balancing speed, simplicity, and long-term maintainability. Identify technical risks before they become business problems. Write production code daily and contribute directly to feature development. Design, build, and support scalable SaaS applications. Lead implementation efforts for complex customer and platform initiatives. Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and provide technical mentorship. Help define and implement AI strategy and AI-powered capabilities using modern LLM architectures. Develop proofs of concept for customer-facing AI use cases. Architect solutions supporting customer-managed AI, including BYOM and BYOK. Evaluate emerging technologies including MCP architectures, AI agents, orchestration frameworks, and enterprise AI infrastructure patterns. Operate as a Product Engineer and partner closely with Product Leadership, Engineering Leadership, Customer Success, and Sales. Engage with customers to understand onboarding challenges and build demonstrations and prototypes. Translate customer requirements into platform capabilities and support strategic initiatives. Experience Requirements 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production SaaS platforms. Experience as a Staff, Principal, Lead Engineer, or similar technical leadership role. Strong architectural design experience within modern cloud-native environments. Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and systems. Experience partnering with Product and business stakeholders to drive outcomes. Proven ability to balance technical excellence with business priorities. Core technologies: Go (Golang), React, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, cloud-native and distributed systems. Preferred: AI/LLM integration, OpenAI or Anthropic platforms, MCP concepts, agentic AI frameworks, vector databases and retrieval, enterprise AI security and governance, API platform design and integrations, Salesforce ecosystem integrations. Success profile: product-thinking mindset focused on customer outcomes, ownership of ambiguous challenges, clear communication of technical tradeoffs, influence through expertise and execution, proactive risk identification, and comfort operating in fast-moving environments. Education Requirements