Principal Software Engineer (New York)

Principal Software Engineer (Backend / Distributed Systems) Long Island City, NY | Onsite 4 days/week | Visa sponsorship available About the company Venture-backed AI startup in Long Island City building a platform that trains enterprise AI agents on how a business actually works. The product learns from a company’s existing dashboards, code, memos and agent traces so agents can handle complex business tasks accurately, with full lineage back to the source data. Customers include hedge funds, consumer brands and digital asset platforms. The team publishes original research on fine tuning and enterprise reasoning. The role This is a hands-on Principal IC role focused on backend and platform architecture. The engineering team is small and very strong, mostly early-career engineers out of MIT and CMU. You’ll be the person setting architectural direction and helping that team level up while still writing a lot of code yourself. It’s not a people management role. There’s room to grow into broader technical leadership as the company scales, if that interests you. What you’ll do Own major architectural decisions across the backend and platform Design, build and scale distributed production systems Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team Work wherever the product needs you, since backend is the focus but this is an early-stage company What we’re looking for 5+ years of software engineering experience, 7+ preferred Strong backend and distributed systems background Proven ability to design and scale production systems Solid CS fundamentals and programming ability Comfortable operating with ownership and limited structure Startup or product engineering experience preferred. Big Tech backgrounds with strong ownership also work well. Team About 9 people today, including software and research engineers. Compensation Base salary up to $300,000, plus equity. Location Long Island City, NYC. Onsite 4 days a week. Relocation candidates welcome. Visa sponsorship and transfers supported.