Principal Platform and Platform Engineer

At WISEcode, we're a well-funded, dynamic startup. WISEcode makes personalized nutrition a reality based on the facts – what truly is in our food — and marries this data with your preferences. Powered by AI and the world’s best food and nutrition database, WISEcode embraces the fact that we are all different, have different dietary needs, objectives, and preferences, and should not be at the mercy of market spin or “expert” opinion. Every one of us should have the information we need to make the best decisions for ourselves. The Opportunity WISEcode doesn’t hire for incremental impact - we hire for force multipliers. Our Principal Engineers are restless builders who transform complexity into clarity, elevate every team they touch, and create architecture that accelerates the entire company. These are strategic technologists who see systems where others see fragments, who bring long-term thinking into every decision, and who translate bold ideas into elegant, scalable solutions that endure beyond their original use cases. About the Role The Principal Engineer (PE) is WISEcode’s highest-impact individual-contributor role - a technical leader who combines deep hands-on engineering with clear architectural ownership and accountability across major parts of the platform. PEs write excellent code, but also define system boundaries, long-term technical direction, and engineering standards that influence the entire organization over time. While this Principal Engineer role operates at a platform and systems level, this position is anchored in WISEcode’s data, computation, and semantic modeling layers and requires deep, opinionated expertise in designing data systems that scale, evolve, and remain trustworthy as product requirements change. A WISEcode PE is both strategist and builder. You will: • Translate product ideas, domain concepts, and company vision into durable data models, computation layers, and system contracts that preserve meaning as the platform grows. • Design and evolve foundational data systems end-to-end and hand them off once patterns are established, documented, and safely extensible by other teams. • Guide teams through decisions on data modeling, schema evolution, performance tradeoffs, correctness, observability, AI integration, and scale. • Influence without authority - shaping engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, and raising the organizational bar through architectural clarity and principled decision-making. PEs at WISEcode operate as a flexible, high-impact bench. You may embed temporarily into a product or data team to help them accelerate a complex initiative, resolve architectural ambiguity, or establish a new platform capability. You’ll then step out, leaving behind clear system boundaries, shared abstractions, and technical primitives that reduce future uncertainty. Because of their breadth, PEs typically work closely with the CTO and maintain visibility across products, data systems, and infrastructure. Your success is measured not by a single system’s throughput, but by the correctness, performance, and evolvability of the entire WISEcode platform - including how well it continues to scale after your direct involvement ends. How Principal Engineers Operate at WISEcode Systems thinkers with depth. PEs bring T-shaped skills: deep expertise in data modeling, Postgres and lakehouse design, distributed systems, and computation frameworks, combined with broad understanding across product strategy, UX implications, cloud infrastructure, and developer experience. Architects who execute. You can design a semantic data model, tune complex Postgres queries, define efficient computation paths, and implement production-ready systems - and understand how these components must evolve over time without introducing silent data corruption or semantic drift. Product-savvy technologists. PEs help shape product direction, not just implement requirements. You anticipate how data definitions impact user experience, analytics, AI behavior, and long-term product flexibility, and often help frame product discussions through technical clarity. Pragmatic long-term thinkers. You balance delivery speed with architectural integrity. You know where shortcuts are acceptable and where they create irreversible downstream costs. Multipliers. You leave teams stronger: clearer data contracts, better abstractions, higher confidence in system behavior, and faster future delivery that does not depend on your continued presence. AI Skills and Leadership WISEcode is an AI-native company. Every engineer is expected to use AI well, but PEs set the tone. You will: • Design data foundations that enable reliable AI and ML systems, including clean inputs, traceability, and explainability. • Understand how data quality, schema choices, and aggregation logic affect model behavior and downstream inference. • Partner with AI and product teams to ensure intelligent features are grounded in trustworthy, well-modeled data. • Advocate for deterministic, testable computation where appropriate, and probabilistic approaches where they add genuine value. AI is not a bolt-on at WISEcode - it is a horizontal capability. PEs ensure the data platform is capable of supporting intelligent systems without sacrificing correctness, transparency, or trust.