Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer — AI & Distributed Systems Platform - $220,000 - $300,000 base salary

A rapidly scaling AI-native platform operating in the legal and capital markets space is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help architect the next generation of production AI systems for transactional intelligence and document analysis.

This platform is solving deeply complex problems at the intersection of AI, finance, legal workflows, and large-scale distributed systems — transforming billions of transactional terms and unstructured legal documents into structured, searchable market intelligence.

The Opportunity

You’ll join a highly technical, backend-focused engineering team building the core systems powering AI-driven search, orchestration, retrieval, and analytics workflows used by professionals operating in high-trust financial and legal environments.

This is a Principal-level IC role with significant architectural ownership across:

• Distributed backend systems
• AI orchestration platforms
• Document intelligence pipelines
• Retrieval and semantic search infrastructure
• Scalable APIs and data-intensive services
• End-to-end production engineering

The environment combines startup velocity with enterprise-scale data, customers, and infrastructure. The engineering culture is heavily product-oriented, highly autonomous, and optimized for builders who want broad technical ownership.

What You’ll Work On

• Architect scalable backend systems and APIs powering AI-native products
• Build high-performance distributed systems operating across millions of legal and financial documents
• Design orchestration layers for LLM-powered workflows, agents, and retrieval systems
• Develop composable API primitives that accelerate AI feature delivery
• Improve performance, reliability, observability, and scalability across data-intensive workloads
• Drive engineering standards, CI/CD automation, developer experience, and long-term platform maintainability
• Collaborate directly with AI/ML researchers, legal SMEs, finance experts, and product leadership

What They’re Looking For

• 10+ years building scalable backend or platform systems
• end-to-end ownership of system development, from conception to launch
• experience in AI product/AI start up businesses
• Python (FAST API, Django, Flask)
• Vector search, semantic indexing, large-scale document processing

Compensation

• Principal Engineer: $220K–300K USD + 20% bonus
• Canada range: $210K–243K CAD + bonus