Principal Software Engineer Backend

You will set the technical direction for Foreman while remaining hands-on with system design, coding, reviews, and delivery. You will build and operate Python/Django backend services, contribute to full-stack decisions, establish engineering quality standards, and lead incident response. After your initial months, you will manage two to three engineers, support their growth, participate in hiring, and coordinate planning and communication with product and other stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship features across the Python/Django backend and contribute to the Next.js/React frontend as needed
• Own backend architecture and technical direction, documenting trade-off decisions
• Lead the design of curtailment and power controls, automation triggers, and fleet-scale data pipelines
• Set quality standards through code reviews, testing, and collaboration with QA
• Take on-call shifts and lead incident response and follow-up
• Prioritize and reduce technical debt in observability, performance, and legacy backend areas
• Shape the use of AI coding tools, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted review
• Manage two to three engineers through one-to-ones, goals, feedback, reviews, and growth plans
• Contribute to compensation and promotion decisions; interview and hire engineers
• Lead technical planning with Product and define completion criteria
• Communicate status, risks, and decisions to stakeholders
• Mentor senior engineers through reviews, pairing, design discussions, and written guides

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years building and running production software
• Deep Python backend experience; Django preferred
• Experience owning and evolving product architecture end to end
• Technical influence beyond an individual team
• Experience mentoring and growing engineers, including senior engineers
• Ability to review React and TypeScript code and make full-stack decisions
• Experience with on-call work, incident response, monitoring, and root-cause remediation
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools

Benefits

• Benefits
• Bonuses
• Equity
• Flexible work environment