Principal Engineer / CTO Deputy

About the Team

A technology, innovation, and consumer intelligence firm that advises global leaders on emerging science, technology, and market trends to drive smarter, more confident innovation decisions. It combines proprietary research, primary data from startups and industry experts, and advanced analytical frameworks to help organizations identify high-value opportunities, mitigate risk, and accelerate growth. By integrating human expertise with AI-enabled tools, it delivers objective, evidence-based insights that translate complex technological and consumer signals into actionable strategies for R&D, corporate innovation, and executive decision-making. It serves many of the world’s largest technology and consumer goods companies.

Summary

This is a senior, hands-on role for a broad, trusted engineer who will act as the CTO’s technical right hand. Your job is to take day-to-day engineering off the CTO’s plate so he can stay on strategy, vision, and direction: you own the routine technical decisions, review the work, keep the team unblocked, and step in as his stand-in when he is not available. You must be a hands-on, in the code, leader. This is not merely a people and process manager. This is a role built entirely on trust and tight alignment.

You will report directly to the CTO and operate as his deputy. You will work across the whole stack (database, backend, frontend, and infrastructure), go wherever the work needs you, and bring the judgment to tell a right-sized solution from an over-engineered one. You will make and challenge technical calls on the merits and keep delivery moving with quality and momentum.

A core part of this role is leading how we work with AI agents. We want someone who builds and debugs with agents as a matter of course, across the whole stack, and who will help establish that as a team culture: setting the standards and practices that multiply what every engineer can ship.

You will be a core part of the engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Act as the CTO’s stand-in for day-to-day engineering: make and own routine technical decisions when he is unavailable and represent his intent faithfully.
• Own the day-to-day individual contributor (IC) flow: pull request review and approval, unblocking engineers, and keeping work moving so decisions do not bottleneck on the CTO.
• Operate in tight, high-bandwidth alignment with the CTO. This role lives or dies on trust, so over-communicate, flag early, and keep no surprises.

• Contribute to architecture and technical decisions across our next-generation platform, partnering with the CTO and platform architect on direction and tradeoffs.
• Bring a pragmatic, right-sized approach to the work: favor solutions that fit the real need over ones that overbuild for scale we will not operate at. “Done beats perfect.”

• Contribute directly across database, backend, frontend, and DevOps/infrastructure as the work demands. Fill gaps wherever they open up.
• Prototype, build core components, and lead by example on quality.

• Champion and help establish a culture of agentic development across the engineering team, so AI agents are a core part of how we build, debug, and operate, not an occasional convenience.
• Set the standards, patterns, and guardrails for working with agents well (context and prompting practices, review and verification, where to trust them and where not) so the team’s output multiplies without quality dropping.
• Use agents across the full lifecycle and the full stack: development, debugging and investigation across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure, testing, and review.
• Bring the rest of the engineers up, so agentic practice becomes a shared team capability rather than a personal one.

• Raise the engineering bar: code review discipline, testing, CI/CD hygiene, and operational soundness across both established and greenfield systems.
• Reduce key-person risk by spreading knowledge and ownership.
• Help turn product and research needs into a clear, sequenced plan of work.

• Partner closely with our platform architect, engineers, product, and research.
• Communicate clearly and proactively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, across async and real-time.

Experience & Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience at a senior, staff, or principal level, with significant hands-on depth you still exercise.
• Genuine, demonstrated breadth across the full stack: databases, backend services, frontend, and devops/cloud infrastructure. We need a strong generalist who can operate credibly in all of these, not a specialist in one.
• Strong system design and architecture judgment, with a pragmatic sense for right-sizing: choosing solutions that fit the need rather than over-engineering them.

• A proven, trusted operator who can run with ambiguous direction and make sound calls the CTO would stand behind, without needing close supervision.
• Pragmatic and outcome-focused: you right-size solutions instead of gold-plating them, and you know what to do first.
• A real sparring partner: you push back, surface tradeoffs, and improve the decision rather than just executing it.
• High integrity and reliability. You are the kind of person someone can hand something to and stop worrying about it.

• Able to commit full-time and operate as an embedded team member, with at least three hours of daily overlap with US Pacific morning hours (the CTO starts his day around 7am Pacific).
• Excellent written and verbal English, and strong, proactive communication habits.
• Hands-on fluency with agentic development. You already build and debug with AI coding agents as a core part of how you work, across the stack, and you can set the practices and standards that help a whole team do the same. This is central to the role, not a bonus. Familiarity with building LLM-powered systems (retrieval/RAG, agentic workflows) is a further plus on top of that.

Qualities of the Successful Candidate

• You are trustworthy and low ego: you own outcomes, give credit to others, and make the whole team more effective, not just yourself.
• You are pragmatic and bold about improving things, but you right-size your solutions instead of over-engineering them.
• You create clarity in ambiguity rather than waiting to be handed it.
• You treat AI agents as a force multiplier for the whole team, and you are as energized by raising how everyone around you works as by your own output.
• You are a strong communicator who keeps the people who depend on you informed, with no surprises.
• You want to throw yourself completely into building something exciting and larger than yourself.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Broad knowledge of software engineering across languages, frameworks, infrastructure, and current trends.

We offer

• Competitive salary to be defined upon the interview results
• Full time REMOTE WORK