Principal Backend Engineer

Hauler Hero Inc.•New York, NY

6d•Remote

About The Position

Hauler Hero is a leading waste management SaaS platform serving haulers and waste management companies. We build modern technology that transforms how the industry operates, from route optimization to billing and customer management. We’ve achieved product-market fit and are now scaling the platform to support rapid customer growth. We’re hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to help scale a proven production system through its next major growth phase. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll inherit a functioning platform and be responsible for identifying bottlenecks, improving performance, evolving architecture, and ensuring our backend and data systems scale reliably as the business grows. You’ll work closely with the Head of Engineering and existing principal engineers to shape technical direction. Expect to spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code. We extensively use AI tools in our daily development workflow. As a principal engineer, you'll: Use AI for code implementation while owning architecture, design, and technical standards Validate all AI-generated solutions for correctness, scalability, and edge cases Mentor the team on effective AI usage and critical thinking Engineers excited about AI-assisted development who can establish best practices Strong technical leaders who understand that AI speed doesn't mean lower standards Principal engineers who will guide the team through this transition Engineers resistant to AI-assisted development or unwilling to use it daily Those who blindly accept AI output without validating it You’ve scaled real production systems through significant growth phases You’ve solved PostgreSQL performance and scaling challenges Other engineers seek your architectural guidance You’ve made long-term architectural decisions with company-wide impact You can clearly articulate tradeoffs between multiple valid approaches You’ve mentored senior engineers and elevated team capability You bring deep expertise, not just familiarity, in your core technologies

Requirements

8+ years backend engineering experience
2+ years operating at staff or principal scope
Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot
Deep PostgreSQL expertise, including: Query optimization for high-volume workloads Multi-tenant SaaS schema design Partitioning and data lifecycle strategies Performance tuning (indexing, EXPLAIN ANALYZE) Connection pooling and operational scaling
Proven experience scaling existing systems
Cloud experience (GCP preferred, AWS acceptable)
Strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices
CI/CD and production operations experience
Strong communication and mentoring skills