Principal Software Engineer, AI & Platform

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and evolve architectural standards across customer-facing and operational systems.

• Lead the design of complex software systems, integrations, workflows, and data models.

• Drive long-term technical strategy while balancing short-term business priorities.

• Identify technical risks and opportunities early and develop pragmatic plans to address them.

• Lead architectural reviews and guide major technical decisions across teams.

• Establish patterns that improve reliability, maintainability, scalability, and developer productivity.

AI-Driven Engineering

• Champion AI-assisted software development across the organization.

• Define best practices for leveraging LLMs in coding, testing, debugging, documentation, code review, and operational workflows.

• Design and build agentic systems that automate engineering and business processes.

• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and determine where they can create measurable value.

• Help iterate on Koala's approach to AI-enabled software development and organizational productivity.

• Ensure AI systems are implemented responsibly, securely, and with appropriate operational safeguards.

Engineering Excellence

• Raise the bar for code quality, testing, documentation, and operational readiness.

• Drive improvements in CI/CD, deployment safety, developer experience, and engineering workflows.

• Establish standards for observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.

• Introduce tooling and automation that improve engineering velocity without sacrificing quality.

• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.

Delivery & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product, Operations, Pharmacy, Customer Care, Growth, and Finance teams to understand business challenges and design effective solutions.

• Translate ambiguous business requirements into scalable technical approaches.

• Lead initiatives from concept through implementation, rollout, and operational support.

• Ensure technical decisions align with company goals and customer outcomes.

Mentorship & Organizational Impact

• Help mentor engineers across all experience levels.

• Provide thoughtful guidance through design reviews, architecture discussions, and code reviews.

• Help develop engineering processes that scale as the organization grows.

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to cross-functional stakeholders.

• Influence engineering culture through technical leadership rather than organizational authority.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating complex, production-scale systems.
• Expert-level Ruby on Rails experience with strong knowledge of modern web application architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Proven experience leading technical architecture, driving engineering direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering reliable, observable, high-performing systems.
• Strong product and business judgment with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Deep expertise with modern AI development, including LLMs, AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot), and building AI-powered products, agents, automation, or developer workflows.
• Understanding of agent architectures, retrieval systems, tool-calling, evaluation frameworks, and AI system reliability, with a demonstrated ability to use AI to improve engineering velocity and team effectiveness.
• Authorization to work in the United States (Koala is not able to sponsor visas for this role).

• Experience in healthcare, pharmacy, veterinary, or other regulated industries.
• Experience in high-volume eCommerce, subscription businesses, logistics, or operations-heavy environments.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, workflow orchestration systems, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience leading platform engineering, infrastructure, or developer productivity initiatives.
• Familiarity with AI evaluation, observability, governance, and operational best practices.

• Meaningful mission helping modernize pet health
• Remote-first culture built on flexibility and trust
• Competitive base salary with performance-based incentives
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with partial dependent coverage
• Generous PTO and a 401(k) plan
• Supportive, close-knit team that celebrates wins and learns fast