Principal Engineer – AI-First Engineering (Remote)

Location: Remote, in Europe

Our client is a profitable European B2B SaaS company developing software for a specialised enterprise market. Its product supports business-critical workflows for professional customers and is now entering the next stage of commercial growth.

Unlike many software companies, the business has taken a deliberately different approach to engineering. Rather than scaling through ever-growing development teams, the company believes that modern AI has fundamentally changed how experienced engineers can design, build, and operate software. AI is not viewed as a coding assistant, but as an integral part of the engineering process — accelerating implementation, reducing repetitive work, and allowing engineers to focus on architecture, decision-making, and solving complex business problems.

The platform has already been built and successfully launched. The next step is not rewriting it, but evolving it: strengthening the architecture, maintaining operational excellence, introducing thoughtful improvements, and continuously refining AI-assisted engineering workflows as the product and customer base grow.

To support this vision, the company is looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to become the long-term technical owner of the platform. Working directly with the CTO, who oversees technology across several portfolio companies, you will take ownership of one product and help shape what an AI-first engineering organisation can look like in practice.

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of the platform's technical architecture, infrastructure, and operational stability.
• Design, implement, and evolve technical solutions that balance delivery speed, maintainability, security, and long-term scalability.
• Continuously improve AI-assisted engineering workflows across software development, testing, documentation, and operational processes.
• Build and maintain modern cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, observability, and production environments.
• Drive architectural decisions while managing technical debt pragmatically rather than pursuing unnecessary perfection.
• Ensure the platform remains secure, reliable, and easy to operate as the business scales.
• Collaborate closely with the CTO on technical strategy, product evolution, and long-term engineering direction.
• Translate business requirements into pragmatic technical solutions that create measurable business value.
• Increase engineering efficiency through automation and thoughtful system design.
• Maintain clear technical documentation, architecture decision records, and operational runbooks.
  
  

Who You Are

• You have extensive experience designing, building, and operating production software systems throughout their lifecycle.
• You have worked in roles such as Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Solution Architect, Hands-on CTO, Technical Lead, or similar highly autonomous technical positions.
• You combine strong software engineering skills with practical experience in infrastructure, cloud platforms, production operations, and system architecture.
• You are comfortable working across multiple technical domains, from backend development and distributed systems to infrastructure, security, and deployment.
• You have hands-on experience with Linux environments, cloud platforms, containers, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and modern observability practices.
• You make pragmatic technical decisions and enjoy solving ambiguous problems without waiting for perfect requirements.
• You communicate clearly, document your work, and naturally build systems that other engineers can understand and maintain.
• AI-assisted development is already part of your daily engineering workflow. You actively explore modern coding agents, automation, and AI-powered engineering practices, and you're excited about helping define what excellent AI-first software engineering looks like.
  
  

Nice to Have

• Experience working in B2B SaaS or enterprise software environments.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, or similar platform engineering technologies.
• Experience building AI-powered internal tooling or engineering automation.
• Background in security, identity management, or DevSecOps.
• Experience acting as the primary technical owner of a product or platform.