About the Company
The company is an established B2B SaaS platform serving manufacturers across the lighting, furniture, and home décor sectors. With more than ten years in the market, it has built strong customer retention through deeply embedded, defensible workflows that support complex, real-world operations.
The business is now entering a focused phase of improvement and growth, centered on scalable operating systems, pragmatic product evolution, and a modern, disciplined go-to-market strategy designed to drive long-term value creation.
Job Overview
The role calls for a hands-on Principal Engineer or Engineering Lead who operates as a player-coach with direct accountability for a production SaaS platform. This individual will be responsible for improving, extending, and running the system day to day, while partnering closely with leadership as well as product, support, and go-to-market teams.
This is a full-time, fully remote position aligned with U.S. East Coast working hours. It is well suited for a senior engineer seeking meaningful ownership in the near term, with a clear progression toward Head of Engineering, CTO, or general management responsibilities over time.
Core Responsibilities
Product & Platform Engineering
- Design, build, and enhance features across the platform
- Work across backend, client-side, and system-level workflows
- Take features from concept through implementation to customer adoption
- Make incremental improvements to a mature codebase without large-scale rewrites
System Ownership & Operations
- Own system behavior in real-world production environments
- Investigate performance, scalability, and load-related issues
- Improve system stability, reliability, and predictability over time
- Respond to, diagnose, and resolve production incidents
Product Thinking & Synthesis
- Translate customer pain points, support feedback, and business context into technical solutions
- Lead or participate in design and whiteboarding discussions
- Operate effectively with incomplete information to deliver pragmatic solutions
AI-Native Development
- Use AI and LLMs in daily development to explore solutions and accelerate delivery
- Apply AI tools to reason about and improve existing code
- Contribute to AI-driven features and capabilities within the product
Support & Market Context
- Occasionally engage directly with customer support cases and conversations
- Debug real customer issues and explain solutions to non-technical stakeholders
- Stay close to market usage to understand how the product is applied in practice
Skills and Requirements
Core Engineering
- Proven experience working on production SaaS platforms
- Proficiency in Rails sufficient to contribute effectively to an existing codebase
- Full-stack, generalist approach with the ability to navigate different parts of a system
System Ownership
- Demonstrated experience owning live systems end-to-end, beyond individual features
- Strong diagnostic skills across code, data, and workflow issues
- Willingness to take full responsibility for system outcomes
Legacy Codebases
- Experience making incremental improvements to mature codebases
- Pragmatic approach to managing technical debt and refactoring
Product & Problem Solving
- Ability to synthesize input from multiple stakeholders into practical solutions
- Comfortable working with ambiguity and incomplete requirements
- Experience leading or actively contributing to design discussions
AI Fluency
- Hands-on experience using LLMs and AI tools in development workflows
- Conceptual understanding of AI/ML models
- Early adopter mindset with practical application of AI technologies
Ownership & Collaboration
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability
- Ability to operate autonomously within a small, senior team
- Clear communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Success Metrics (First 60–90 Days)
- Gain a deep understanding of the codebase, workflows, and customer context
- Enhance system stability, reliability, and predictability
- Deliver incremental improvements that simplify platform operations
- Contribute meaningfully to product discussions, articulating technical trade-offs in business terms
Who This Role Is For
- Senior engineers or engineering leads looking for meaningful ownership of a production platform
- Technologists who prefer enhancing and optimizing existing systems over rebuilding from scratch
- Candidates interested in gaining exposure to product strategy, customer needs, and broader business context
- Engineers with long-term aspirations toward CTO, Head of Engineering, or general management positions
Who This Role Is Not For
- Engineers seeking narrowly defined, task- or ticket-based individual contributor roles
- Pure people managers who do not wish to actively write code
- Candidates who view system rewrites as the primary solution to technical challenges
- Individuals uncomfortable with taking accountability or engaging directly with customers
Working Cadence & Compensation
- Full-time, fully remote role aligned with U.S. East Coast working hours
- Operates within a lean team structure, offering high autonomy and accountability
- Involves close collaboration with executive leadership
- Competitive compensation package, with potential for growth linked to increasing responsibility and impact