Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Department: Gitwit

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Tulsa, OK

Compensation: $190,000 - $230,000 / year

Description

Great zero-to-one builders are becoming more careful about where to spend their next years.

AI is opening a rare company-creation window, with unusual room for new ventures to emerge fast. But that does not make great opportunities easier to find. And it definitely does not make great products easier to build.

Once you've done real zero-to-one work, you know the risk is not just failure. It is spending your next years on something that was never real enough to deserve them.

Gitwit was built to find problems worth solving.

We are an AI-first venture studio built to win this moment through systematic exploration, ruthless validation, and fast cross-functional building.

Over the last few years, we've launched products including an AI report-writing platform for psychologists, an AI troubleshooting platform for manufacturers, and AI-powered workflow tools for operators in complex industries. Over the next several years, we plan to launch more than a dozen new AI-native ventures.

We do not ask you to make one blind bet on one company, one founder, or one codebase. We sweep broadly, test rigorously, and build the ventures that earn the right to exist.

This role is for the kind of engineer who already knows the difference: someone who cares as much about what should be built as how to build it, and who wants the real version of ownership. Real product authorship, real technical direction, real proximity to users and venture decisions, and repeated chances to shape what gets built and how it gets to traction.

And of course, real upside when the winners emerge, including meaningful equity participation across every venture the studio builds.

This role is designed for engineers who have already led major technical initiatives, shaped engineering strategy, and demonstrated exceptional judgment in ambiguous zero-to-one environments.

This is not a role for someone who wants a clean lane, a polished backlog, and a roadmap handed down from somewhere else.

It is for an engineer who wants to be close to the questions that matter earliest: What is the real problem? What is the sharpest way to solve it? What should be built now? What should wait? What should be killed before more time gets wasted?

At Gitwit, principal engineers like this do not sit downstream from product decisions. They help shape them. You will work closely with designers, product strategists, researchers, and venture leaders to turn raw opportunity into real products people want.

You will set technical direction, but also influence the bigger decisions that determine whether something becomes a feature, a product, or a company. You will think about user experience, business model, technical tradeoffs, speed, quality, and what the market is actually telling us.

And because this is a venture studio, you will not spend your best years trapped inside one stale system or one narrow bet. You will get repeated chances to build from zero, learn fast, and apply that learning again.

That is the seat.

Most early-stage engineering roles ask you to make one concentrated bet: one company, one market, one founder, one codebase, one trajectory. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it means spending your next years inside something that was never strong enough underneath.

Gitwit is structured differently.

Here, you get the intensity and zero-to-one challenge of early-stage building without tying all of your learning, upside, and career energy to a single fragile bet.

This is not just a chance to join a company. It is a chance to build inside a company-creation system.

What You'll Actually Build and Shape

In this role, you will help turn raw opportunities into real products at the heart of new venture creation. You will be involved early, when the questions are still open, the signal is still forming, and the right move is not always obvious.

Most of the ventures we create are software products, typically full-stack web applications with AI functionality at their core. You'll help build products where intelligence is part of the user experience itself, not simply a tool used behind the scenes by the development team.

That means your work will include:

• Shaping products from the beginning. Helping define what should be built, what should wait, and what should be cut before time gets wasted.
• Building from zero and shipping fast. Taking ideas from early concept to prototype to real product in users' hands, often in days, not months.
• Seeing your work in the wild immediately. You won't work on tiny pieces of a giant system that may never reach production. What you build here ships, gets used, and teaches us something right away.
• Making foundational technical decisions. Choosing the right tools, architecture, and tradeoffs for the stage, instead of inheriting someone else's stack by default.
• Working close to the truth. Learning directly from users, pressure-testing assumptions, and adjusting quickly when the signal changes.
• Building across the full product reality. Thinking not just about whether something works technically, but whether it is useful, usable, differentiated, and economically sound.
• Operating at a pace that keeps things fun. Small teams, minimal process, and the expectation that meaningful progress happens daily. If you love moving quickly, you'll thrive here. If you prefer long cycles and layers of review, this will feel uncomfortable.
• Helping shape ventures, not just software. Contributing to the decisions that determine whether something becomes a feature, a product, or a company.

The Kind of Engineer We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who has personally done meaningful zero-to-one work. Someone who has helped shape the product, technical, and execution decisions that determine whether something gains traction or stalls.

That might mean you were an early engineer at a startup. It might mean you built a new product or system from scratch inside a larger company. It might mean you created something on your own and carried it far enough to learn what real users, real constraints, and real tradeoffs actually feel like.

What matters most is not where it happened. What matters is that you have felt the difference between building from zero and executing inside something already defined, and you know you want more of the former.

The strongest candidates for this role tend to have several of these traits:

• They have real zero-to-one evidence. They have built something from scratch far enough to make meaningful product, technical, and speed-versus-quality tradeoffs in the real world.
• They think like a product builder, not just an implementer. They care about what should be built, what users actually need, what should be simplified, and what is not worth building.
• They move well in ambiguity. They do not need every variable resolved before they can make progress. They know how to create clarity while building.
• They have strong technical judgment. They can make sound architectural and tooling decisions for the stage, without over-engineering or blindly defaulting to whatever is newest.
• They have built modern web products. They have experience designing and shipping full-stack applications using modern frameworks and understand how to balance speed, maintainability, and product quality. Our teams primarily build in TypeScript across the stack, with React-based frontends and Node.js services on the backend.
• They have built AI-native product experiences. They have experience working with foundation model APIs and understand concepts like prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool calling, agent workflows, evaluation, and the practical tradeoffs involved in bringing AI features into production.
• They are voracious learners with sharp judgment about emerging technology. They stay close to the frontier of new AI capabilities, tools, interfaces, and product patterns, not to chase novelty, but to understand what creates real leverage. They know how to evaluate new technology quickly, apply it selectively, and use it where it makes the product sharper, the workflow stronger, or the venture more advantaged.
• They have taste. They care whether something is sharp, usable, coherent, and worth a user's time, not just whether it technically functions.
• They can work as part of a real venture team. They communicate clearly, collaborate well, and can think across product, user, business, and technical realities without losing rigor.
• They want the real version of ownership. Not just more work or more surface area, but more authorship over what gets built and how it earns traction.

You do not need to match some narrow founder-engineer stereotype to be right for this role.

But you should be the kind of engineer who has already shown the instincts and wants a seat that actually lets them use them.

While technologies vary by venture, our teams commonly work with:

• TypeScript across the stack
• React and modern frontend frameworks
• Node.js backend services
• PostgreSQL and cloud-native infrastructure
• OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation model APIs
• AI orchestration, retrieval systems, and workflow automation

We care far more about strong engineering judgment than experience with any specific tool. The exact stack will evolve. The ability to learn, adapt, and make sound technical decisions is what matters most.

What We Offer

This role comes with the things strong engineers should expect: competitive salary, strong benefits, and meaningful equity in every venture the studio builds. Unlike most startup opportunities, your upside is not tied to a single company. It grows alongside the portfolio of ventures we create together.

But the real offer is bigger than a comp package alone.

You get a rare zero-to-one seat in an AI-first venture studio built to launch multiple companies, not just maintain one. You get the intensity and authorship of early-stage building, with the structural advantages of a studio: stronger validation, shared resources, repeated shots on goal, and the chance to help build multiple high-impact ventures over time.

Practically, that includes:

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity in every venture the studio builds
• 8 weeks of PTO
• Excellent health, vision, and dental insurance, with 99% of employee premiums paid
• 401(k) with 4% match
• Life insurance
• Paid parental leave
• Cell phone reimbursement
• High-trust, high-autonomy culture
• The chance to work on multiple high-impact ventures each year
• Remote-first collaboration with occasional in-person team gatherings

The package matters. But for the right person, the bigger offer is where you get to place your next years.

This is a full-time remote role for candidates based in the United States.

We're building an AI-first venture studio, and strong collaboration still matters. We work closely across engineering, design, product, research, and venture leadership, but we do not require relocation to Tulsa or daily office presence.

We do ask that you're able to overlap with core Central Time working hours, participate actively in team collaboration, and travel occasionally for key planning sessions, venture work, or team gatherings when needed.

This is not a casual remote position. We are looking for someone who wants to be deeply engaged in the work, the decisions, and the venture-building process.

If you thrive in high-autonomy environments, communicate clearly, and can drive zero-to-one work without needing constant supervision, this setup is designed for you.

No cover letter. No generic note.

This is the Gitwit Builder's Application. We think it does a much better job of highlighting your unique capabilities and qualities than a resume.

Don't spend time on polish. Raw, conversational, deeper narrative will give us a better signal of how great you are than a fancy deck. Notes, word doc, markdown file, notion, video - whatever works for you.

Click "Apply Now" to dive in.