Principal Full Stack Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Job title - Principal Full Stack Engineer

Employment type - Full-time employee (FTE)

Work location - 100% remote

Travel - Minimal - occasional team and conference travel

Base salary band $125,000 - $185,000 (Band B5)

Target start date

Before the end of October 2026

About Slater Certified®

Slater Certified® is an AI-powered workforce development platform for the water and wastewater sector. It delivers self-paced training that prepares professionals for licensure and continuing education, built around G.A.I.L. (Generative Artificial Intelligence Learning) - an interactive tutor that gives real-time feedback, personalized explanations and adaptive support, so someone studying on demand still gets guidance. The flagship course is a 40-hour Wastewater Class 3 Operator Training recognized by the Georgia Secretary of State, alongside a 24-hour continuing education course and an industrial wastewater program. Organizations can run a customized version, Powered by Slater Certified®, against their own workforce.

Slater Certified, LLC is the workforce development arm of Slater Infrastructure Group, LLC - an Alpharetta, Georgia infrastructure services firm founded in 1997, working across operations and maintenance, construction engineering and inspection, and environmental services for public and private clients. Slater Certified launched in July 2025 and is licensed in Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

The team is small and moves fast. Technology choices are modern and made by the people who have to live with them, so the distance between an idea and a decision is short, and the distance between a decision and shipping it is shorter. Work is remote and the schedule is flexible. Ownership sits with the person doing the work, and there is real room to shape how things get built rather than inheriting someone else's process.

Position summary

Slater Certified® runs a React front end and an Express back end on Vercel, with Firestore behind it and G.A.I.L., our generative AI tutor, at the center of the learning experience. The platform is live, it carries real learners against state-approved curricula, and it is about to be asked to do considerably more than it was originally built for.

This is a 100% hands-on coding position. The person in this seat writes production code every day and builds the hardest parts of the platform personally. Architectural direction is set by the Chief Technology & Business Officer; you are the senior engineering voice feeding into those decisions and the person who turns them into working software.

It is a small team, so what you build reaches learners quickly and there is nowhere to hide.

What this role owns in the first 12 months

• Is shipping production code across the front end, API and data layer inside the first month, and keeps doing it for the life of the role.

• Is the CTBO's working partner on architecture - bringing options, trade-offs and a recommendation rather than waiting to be told.

• Sets the engineering standards that stick: testing, code review, what “done” means, and the release path from TEST to production.

• Removes the top three scaling or reliability risks in the platform - identified inside the first 60 days, closed by month twelve.

• Raises the technical level of the team around them, measurably, in code review and in what others are able to ship unaided.

• Is the person the CTBO can hand a hard technical problem to and not follow up on.

Key responsibilities

Hands-on engineering - 100% of this role

• Write production code every day. This is not a role that stops coding, and it is not a step toward management.

• Build the hardest parts of the platform personally.

• Design and build the APIs and services the rest of the platform depends on.

• Work across React, Express, Firestore and the Vercel deployment path.

Architecture and technical input

• Architectural direction is set by the CTBO. You are the senior engineering voice in those decisions.

• Bring options, trade-offs and a recommendation - not just an implementation once the decision has been made.

• Document how the platform actually fits together, and keep that picture current.

• Weigh what ships this quarter against what the platform will need in two years.

AI and the product

• Build and extend the platform on top of G.A.I.L., our generative AI tutor.

• Advise on where generative AI genuinely improves the learning product and where it does not.

Engineering excellence

• Set and hold coding standards, review practice and the definition of done.

• Mentor engineers directly, in code review and in design.

• Improve the release path so that deploying is routine rather than an event.

• Support hiring - interview, calibrate, and help build the team.

Security, compliance and reliability

• Build authentication and authorization correctly.

• Build to FERPA expectations for learner data and to the standards our state approvals depend on.

• Instrument the platform so failures surface before a learner reports them.

Must have

• 10+ years building production software, several of them at principal, staff or equivalent technical-lead level.

• Has been accountable for the architecture of a production system, and lived with the consequences of those decisions.

• Deep JavaScript and TypeScript, with real depth in React on the front end and Node / Express on the back end.

• Production experience with a cloud-hosted document database - Firestore, MongoDB, DynamoDB or similar.

• Has raised the technical level of a team through review, mentoring and standards, without formal authority to do it.

• Has shipped production features built on generative AI APIs, with hands-on experience using Claude.

• Has been the most senior engineer in the room, and been right often enough that people stopped checking.

• Wants a hands-on coding role. This is not a route into engineering management.

Nice to have

• Experience with other generative AI APIs alongside Claude - Gemini, OpenAI or similar.

• Vercel, serverless or edge deployment experience.

• EdTech, LMS, credentialing or regulated-training background.

• Infrastructure as code, and ownership of a CI/CD pipeline.

• Accessibility standards (WCAG) applied in practice rather than in theory.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary band

$125,000 - $185,000, based on experience

Variable compensation - Eligible for participation in annual company bonus pool

Health, dental, vision - Employer provided / supplemented

Retirement - 401(k) - up to 5% matched

Paid time off - Earned over time: generous and flexible policy

Work environment

100% remote

Slater Certified® is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.