Early education is one of the greatest determinants of childhood outcomes, is a must for working families, and has lasting social and economic impact. Brightwheel’s vision is high quality early education for every child. We pursue this by directly supporting teachers in the classroom, engaging parents in the development of their kids, and enabling the small businesses that make up the backbone of the $175 billion early education industry. Brightwheel is the most loved technology brand in early education, trusted by tens of thousands of providers and millions of educators and families. Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally. Our exceptional investor group includes Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Mark Cuban, Notable Capital, and others. You are a Senior Principal Engineer who is both AI-native and relentlessly product-minded. You turn ambiguous, cross-functional opportunities into clear technical direction,and then you prove the path by building. You care about the flagship experiences you ship, and you obsess over the shared “paved highway” that makes it easy for many teams to ship safe, reliable AI over and over again. You will succeed in this role if you are: Driven by outcomes. You care about helping centers stay full, save hours every week, and serve families better, not shipping “an AI feature” for its own sake. The strategic architect and prolific builder. You bridge executive strategy and deep implementation. You set the technical north star, then you get hands-on to deliver reference implementations that teams can adopt with confidence. Decisive on build vs. buy. You have sharp judgment on when to leverage off-the-shelf models and platforms versus when to invest in proprietary infrastructure, fine-tuning, data flywheels, or evaluation systems to create durable advantage. Velocity as a strategy (“show, don’t tell”). You move with the hunger of a founding engineer: you prototype boldly, de-risk quickly, and use working systems, not slides, to align teams and raise the organization’s ambition and pace. A force multiplier with a platform mindset. You build the paved road: evaluation harnesses, retrieval and context patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and developer experience that let product and engineering teams ship AI safely and autonomously. Deep on fundamentals, modern in practice. You understand why models fail (data, evaluation, human feedback, reliability), and you aggressively use modern AI-native tooling to iterate faster without sacrificing rigor. Security- and trust-minded. You treat sensitive school, educator, and family data with care, design for least-privilege access, and build systems that are explainable, monitorable, and resilient. Mission-aligned. The idea of using AI to expand childcare capacity and improve early education outcomes, at meaningful scale, genuinely motivates you. You will make brightwheel measurably more valuable to schools, centers, educators, and families by delivering AI-powered capabilities that move company-level outcomes—for example retention, enrollment conversion, payment success, operational efficiency, and support burden. This is not a research role or a “build cool demos” role; success is defined by impact in production.