Opening Paragraph: 

The Emergency Preparedness & Response (EP&R) team builds the systems that keep critical operations running when it matters most. When storms and severe weather threaten communities and infrastructure across the US, our platform enables customers to rapidly procure, mobilize, and manage the workforce needed to respond to and recover from storm damage — often under tight timelines and high-stakes conditions. We are looking for a Principal Engineer who is deeply hands-on, works backward from customer pain points and business needs, and measures success by impact rather than lines of code shipped. You will be the technical anchor of the team: a backend-heavy full-stack engineer who knows our systems inside and out, reasons rigorously about trade-offs, and raises the engineering bar for everyone around you while leading the team toward outcomes that genuinely matter. 

Duties & Responsibilities: 

• Own the technical vision and architecture for EP&R systems, ensuring they are highly available, resilient, and easy to operate during peak-demand emergency events. 

• Work backward from customer pain points and business goals to define the right problems to solve before writing a single line of code. 

• Stay deeply hands-on — design, build, review, and debug across the stack (backend-heavy, with full-stack breadth) while setting the standard for engineering quality. 

• Break down ambiguous, complex problems into well-scoped, achievable pieces that the team can execute against with clarity. 

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers; set technical direction, unblock people, and cultivate a culture of ownership and high standards. 

• Design with non-functional requirements front of mind — availability, scalability, latency, reliability, cost, and maintainability — and hold the team accountable to them. 

• Define and drive the metrics that matter, using data to guide decisions, validate impact, and continuously improve system and team performance. 

• Partner closely with product, operations, and business stakeholders to align engineering investment with real customer and business outcomes. 

• Anticipate failure modes and design for operational excellence, including readiness for surge scenarios during active storm events. 

• Champion the adoption of AI-powered tools and workflows to accelerate development, improve quality, and increase the team's leverage. 

Required Skills & Experience: 

• 6–8 years of demonstrable software development experience, including 2–3 years leading a team. 

• Strong proficiency in high-level programming languages such as Python, Java, or JavaScript, with backend-heavy full-stack capability. 

• Proven experience building highly available, maintainable, and scalable systems in production. 

• Deep understanding of non-functional requirements (availability, scalability, reliability, latency, cost, maintainability) and how to design for them. 

• A metric-driven mindset — you instrument, measure, and let data drive decisions. 

• Exceptional problem-solving ability and rigorous reasoning about system behavior and trade-offs. 

• Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring engineering teams and delivering results through others. 

• Ability to decompose complex, ambiguous problems into smaller, achievable deliverables. 

• A self-starter who operates with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. 

• An "AI-ready" engineer who actively leverages AI tools to boost personal and team productivity. 

Preferred Skills & Experience: 

• Experience building systems that operate under high-stakes, time-sensitive, or surge-driven conditions (e.g., emergency response, logistics, on-demand marketplaces, or workforce/staffing platforms). 

• Familiarity with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure). 

• Experience with observability, on-call, and operational excellence practices for mission-critical services. 

• Track record of influencing technical direction across teams and mentoring senior engineers. 

• Exposure to workforce management, procurement, or supply/demand matching domains. 

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.