Principal Software Engineer (Backend)

As a Principal Software Engineer on Foreman, you'll set the technical direction for Foreman and raise the bar for how our whole engineering team builds. You'll be judged mainly on the systems you design and build and on how much better the engineers around you get. You'll start fully hands-on, learning the codebase and shipping code. After your first few months, you'll take on two to three direct reports. From then on, expect about 80% of your time building (design, code, reviews) and 20% on people (1:1s, goals, feedback, reviews, hiring). You'll partner with Product on what we build, Front-End with how it looks and works, on full-stack decisions, and with the Director of Engineering on how engineering works and grows.

What You’ll Do

Build (about 80%)

• Design, build, and ship features across Foreman's Python/Django backend, contributing to our Next.js/React frontend as needed.
• Own Foreman's backend architecture and technical direction; make the tradeoff calls and write them down so the team can follow the reasoning.
• Lead the design of systems where mistakes cost customers money: curtailment and power controls, automation triggers, and fleet-scale data pipelines.
• Think long term: weigh what each design makes easier or harder later
• Set the quality bar through code reviews, testing standards, and a close partnership with QA.
• Take on-call shifts and lead incident response and follow-up for Foreman.
• Decide which technical debt to pay down and pay it down alongside delivery: observability, performance at fleet scale, and legacy backend areas.
• Shape how engineering uses AI coding tools, including agentic workflows and AI-assisted review, while keeping quality high.

Lead (about 20%, once you have reports)

• Manage two to three engineers through regular 1:1s, clear goals, direct feedback, fair evidence-based reviews, and growth plans.
• Give input on compensation and promotions, and interview and hire for your area.
• Run Foreman technical planning with Product: break big tasks into shippable pieces and define what “done” means before work starts.
• Keep stakeholders aligned on Foreman work, sharing status, risks, and decisions needed before anyone asks.
• Frame cross-team problems so leadership can decide quickly, with options and a recommendation.
• Grow the senior engineers around you through reviews, pairing, design discussions, skills, and written guides.

Tech Stack You'll Work In

• Python + Django, REST APIs
• Next.js + React + TypeScript, MUI-based design system
• MySQL, BigQuery
• Google Cloud Platform, including Cloud Functions
• Playwright, Jest + React Testing Library
• GitHub, Jira, Sentry
• AI coding tools like Claude Code or Codex

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field; or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years building and running production software, with deep Python backend experience (Django preferred).
• A track record of owning a product's architecture end to end and evolving it over several years, with decisions that held up.
• Technical influence beyond your own team: patterns other engineers adopted, or direction that shaped how an org built software.
• Experience growing other engineers, including senior ones, through mentoring, feedback, and owning their growth.
• Enough frontend fluency to review React/TypeScript code and make sound full-stack calls.
• Experience running systems in production: on-call, incident response, monitoring, and fixing root causes.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward shipping. You define the problem when no one has, split it into what's known and what isn't, and make progress on both.
• You bring solutions to the problems. When you escalate, you come with context, options, and a recommendation.
• You adjust how you communicate to the audience: technical depth for engineers, tradeoffs and timelines for Product, decisions for leadership.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools and a point of view on how a team should use them well.

Bonus Points If You Have...

• Energy, grid, demand response, or industrial operations experience.
• Crypto mining, data center, or IoT fleet management background.
• Experience with device protocols or edge software running on customer hardware.
• B2B SaaS startup experience, ideally Series A or B.
• Building agentic tooling for engineers, like Claude Code skills.
• Experience with GCP data tooling like BigQuery and Looker.
• Talks, writing, or open source work.

Perks & Pay

• Salary range: $160,000–$200,000 per year
• Great benefits, bonuses, & equity, a flexible work environment
• Work on a meaningful product at the intersection of software, operations, and energy.
• Real influence over Foreman's architecture and how the engineering team works.
• Keep building most of the week while growing a small group of strong engineers.

If you want to keep building while growing a couple of strong engineers, and you want your work to have a measurable real-world impact on energy and infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you!

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer — diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences make us better. Everyone is welcome.