Principal Software Engineer, Tooling (Product)

Gemini•New York, NY

16h•$192,500 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Principal Product Engineer, you'll set technical direction for the customer-facing platform that defines how millions of users experience Gemini — onboarding, compliance, customer support, and the systems that hold the customer journey together. This is a role for an engineer who operates at the level of the technology itself: someone accountable for company-level initiatives, who drives the hardest technical challenges across organizational boundaries, and who creates the architectural vision that other teams build against. You'll work across backend, web, and mobile, but your leverage comes less from what you build directly than from the direction you set, the leaders you grow, and the frontier you push. We treat AI-assisted development and automation as first-class — an agentic SDLC pipeline where agents plan, implement, and review work through our harness under human gates. As a Principal, you're expected to shape where that frontier goes, define the patterns and operational guidelines other engineers adopt, and advance how the whole organization builds. If you're energized by owning ambiguous, company-critical technical bets and multiplying the engineers around you, we'd love to talk.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience building and operating complex production systems at scale.
Recognized expertise in one or two core technical domains, with a track record of being accountable for company-level systems or initiatives end to end.
A history of driving architecture and design for the hardest technical challenges across multiple teams or organizations.
Demonstrated ability to set technical vision with company-level impact and to bring an increasingly strategic mindset to engineering decisions.
Fluency across multiple layers of the stack (backend services plus web and/or mobile) and willingness to go deep wherever a problem requires.
Proficiency in a typed language (e.g., TypeScript, Scala, Java, Go) and comfort with JavaScript/TypeScript on web and mobile surfaces.
Experience building consumer-facing applications with strong product and UX sensibility.
Fluency in using AI coding tools and automation, and a point of view on how to advance an agentic development practice.
A record of acting as a technical multiplier — developing engineers and leaders, influencing prioritization across teams, and leading cross-domain initiatives.
Excellent communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical issues to diverse audiences and build alignment across organizations.

Nice To Haves

Experience in the crypto or fintech industry, or as a user of crypto products.
Deep experience with onboarding, identity/KYC, compliance, or customer support tooling.
Experience architecting and operating AI agents or agentic workflows in production at scale.
Familiarity with React/React Native and cloud/microservices architecture.
A record of driving product and technical strategy with data and experimentation.
Experience representing engineering externally (talks, writing) or in cross-company technical collaboration.

Responsibilities

Own the technical vision and architecture for the customer-facing platform, designing for scale and reliability with a multi-year horizon and anticipating needs before they arrive.
Review critical designs across organizations and drive the designs for projects involving the hardest technical challenges at the company; act as a key driver of demos and technical direction beyond your own team.
Be accountable for one or more core company initiatives spanning onboarding, compliance (KYC/identity), and customer support — carrying them from ambiguity through production and long-term operation.
Identify strategic direction in technology and product, proposing and adopting architecture and platform approaches that advance it; tie technical bets clearly to company objectives.
Plan and deliver large, complex, cross-org programs with interdependencies across teams and systems, spanning months to years; identify the problems worth solving and advocate for their prioritization.
Define patterns, operational guidelines, and engineering practices for your vertical(s), and extend process improvements across teams and command pilot units.
Provide critical technical guidance proactively — raising the security, reliability, and quality bar across the organization, and debugging or contributing to the most complex parts of a system when needed.
Act as a technical multiplier: mentor and develop engineers and future leaders, share knowledge, delegate to grow others, and lead initiatives across domains, including outside your core area of expertise.
Drive the organization toward a strategic vision for strong systems, sustainable practice, and healthy engineering culture; play a critical role in recruiting and bar-raising.