Principal Software Engineer

Bizee•Houston, TX

1d•Remote

About The Position

Bizee (formerly Incfile) has helped over 1 million entrepreneurs start and run their businesses. We are transforming from a transaction-focused formation business to an AI-powered operating system for entrepreneurs. We champion the everyday entrepreneur. We believe in self-determination, grit, and earned success. No fluff, no jargon, no pretense. We work hard, ship fast, and let our products speak for themselves. We are looking for engineering craftspeople who share these values and want to build the intelligent platform that powers the next generation of American businesses. What Makes Working Here Different AI-Native Engineering: AI is not a bolt-on; it is our core. You will build with AI, ship AI-powered products, and push the boundaries of what AI-assisted development can deliver. High Agency, High Impact: You set the technical direction across teams and domains. We do not hand you architecture diagrams; you define the path forward and build it. Greenfield Meets Real Scale: We are rebuilding our platform while serving 1M+ entrepreneurs. You will design systems that are smart from day one, not retrofitted with intelligence later. Craft Matters Here: We care about elegant solutions, clean abstractions, and code that other engineers are proud to maintain. We measure engineering quality, not just velocity. The Role As the Principal Software Engineer, you are the most senior individual contributor in the engineering organization. You work across product and platform domains to solve cross-cutting technical challenges, drive architectural evolution, and raise the engineering bar for ~50 engineers. This is not an "architect" role where you draw diagrams and hand them off. You are a builder who happens to operate at principal scope. You spend 70%+ of your time writing production code, designing systems, and reviewing pull requests. You build what you design, debug the hardest problems, and leave the codebase better than you found it. You operate fluidly across product squads, core platform, and shared infrastructure. When a Growth squad needs architecture guidance on a conversion optimization feature, you are there. When the platform team is designing event-driven service boundaries, you are there. You see the full picture and ensure technical decisions in one domain do not create debt in another. This is an AI-native engineering role. You have deep, hands-on experience building and deploying AI-powered products in production. You use AI tools daily to accelerate development, and you have developed a point of view on how AI changes the way software should be designed, built, and shipped. We will ask you to demonstrate this with real examples from your work. Reports to Engineering Manager. Works closely with Head of Platform, Product and Engineering Managers on cross-domain architecture decisions.

Requirements

AI Product Builder: You have built and shipped AI-powered features or products in production. You understand the full lifecycle: from model selection and prompt engineering through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. You have a strong opinion on where AI creates real value vs. where it is theater.
Deep Technical Craft: You write production code daily. You can pick up a complex PR, identify the architectural risk, and suggest a better approach with concrete implementation guidance. Your code is something other engineers learn from.
Full-Stack Fluency: Strong across backend and frontend. You understand APIs, event-driven architecture, and how data flows through complex systems. You evaluate decisions across the entire stack.
Architecture at Scale: You have designed and shipped systems serving significant traffic. You understand the tradeoffs between approaches, not just the patterns. You know when to invest in a clean abstraction and when to ship the pragmatic solution.
Cross-Domain Thinking: You move comfortably between product delivery and platform infrastructure. You understand that great product engineering depends on great platform foundations, and you ensure the two evolve in lockstep.
AI-Native Development: You personally use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and can demonstrate measurable productivity gains. You have developed workflows and patterns that multiply your output.
Influence Through Craft: You raise the bar through code reviews, design sessions, and pairing. Engineers seek your input because your guidance makes them better, not because you have a title.

Nice To Haves

You can walk us through an AI-powered product you shipped in production, including what worked, what did not, and what you learned about designing for AI from day one.
You can show us recent commits, PRs, or open-source contributions from the last 6 months that demonstrate your craft.
You have a strong opinion, backed by experience, on how AI changes the way we should design and build software systems.
You can demonstrate a specific AI-assisted development workflow that multiplied your output.
You have experience working across both product and infrastructure domains, and can articulate how you navigated the tension between speed-to-market and platform investment.
Experience in the Prosumer or SMB space and understanding of the unique psychology of the small business owner.
Background in e-commerce, legal tech, fintech, or compliance-heavy industries with multi-state regulatory complexity.

Responsibilities

Architecture Leadership: Lead solution design for the highest-complexity initiatives across both product and platform domains. Deliver technical designs that balance speed-to-market with long-term platform health. You own the intercept point where product needs and platform capabilities meet.
AI-Powered Product Delivery: Design and ship AI-powered features into production (intelligent recommendations, automated compliance, predictive lifecycle, or similar). These should demonstrate real customer value, not AI for the sake of AI.
Platform Evolution: Own and deliver critical modernization efforts spanning service decomposition, event-driven architecture, and data migration. Design for intelligence from the start, not as an afterthought. Ensure platform investments directly unblock product delivery.
Engineering Craft: Establish and enforce coding standards, review guidelines, and architectural patterns across all engineering teams. Measurable improvement in code review cycle time and defect escape rate. Raise the quality bar so that every team ships with confidence.
Cross-Domain Integration: Serve as the connective tissue between product engineering and platform engineering. Ensure shared services, APIs, and data contracts are designed for reuse across retail, commercial, and partner channels. Prevent architectural drift between squads.
Technical Mentorship: Directly mentor Technical Leads across both product and platform domains on architecture, engineering craft, and AI-native development practices. At least 2 Tech Leads demonstrating measurable growth in technical decision-making.
Incident Response: Serve as the senior escalation point for P1/P2 production incidents across engineering. Reduce mean time to resolution by 40%.