PRINCIPAL ENGINEER - FULLSTACKCOMPANY : STEVEN.COMREPORTING TO : VP of ENGINEERINGLOCATION: LOS ANGELESSALARY : UP TO $185kROLE MISSIONThe most senior individual contributor engineering seat at Steven.com. You set the technical bar for the whole engineering team, own architecture for the ITO's hardest and highest-stakes systems, and make the calls that don't have a committee to hide behind. Reporting to the CITO and partnering closely with the VP of Engineering & Applied AI, you own technical depth while they own execution and people. Founding team role. What you build in year one shapes the product for years.
KEY OUTCOMES- Own the architecture of Steven.com's most complex systems, from design through production and long-term evolution
- Set the engineering standards, patterns, and abstractions the rest of the team builds on
- Architect the AI-native core of the product: LLM-powered workflows, intelligent pipelines, and agentic systems that don't exist yet
- Make the final call on high-stakes design decisions and catch systemic risk before it becomes debt or downtime
- Mentor senior and junior engineers, raise the bar through code review and architectural conversation
- Turn ambiguous product bets into concrete technical plans with clear tradeoffs, working directly with CITO, VP Eng, and Product
CORE COMPETENCIES- Track record of designing and shipping complex, large-scale distributed systems in production, not just contributing to someone else's
- Deep full-stack proficiency: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, and Google Cloud/AWS
- Real experience architecting AI/ML systems, LLM applications, or intelligent pipelines at production scale
- Comfortable reasoning across levels of abstraction at once, from API design to infrastructure to product
- Sharp written communication, documentation a team can build from and an exec can understand
YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF- You see the whole system and never touch a component without understanding what it's connected to
- You reason from first principles, not analogy, and you'll challenge inherited architecture if the foundations are wrong
- You know when to be precise and when to be fast, and you make that call on purpose
- You have a real point of view on where AI infrastructure is heading
- You treat architectural decisions as close to permanent, so you document them properly and don't make them lightly
- You're intellectually honest: you push back early, surface problems fast, and change your mind when the evidence says to
IDEAL BACKGROUND- Founding engineer, staff engineer, or technical lead at a startup or high-growth company
- CS or ML research background with production research experience
- Published research, open source work, conference talks, or other visible engineering community contribution
- We care less about titles, years, and pedigree, and more about the systems you can point to and defend end to end
Department Steven.com Locations Los Angeles, US
