Principal Engineer

Paperless Parts provides the manufacturing industry with a SaaS platform that empowers the next generation of manufacturers to join the digital age. When manufacturers use our product, they free up valuable time for faster quoting and estimating, leading to increased profitability and reduced manual steps. From life-saving medical devices to critical components that unlock new depths of outer space, our customers produce parts that go into some of the world’s coolest and most impactful products. It is our mission to enable manufacturers with the technology they need to drive innovation forward.

We are a team of motivated and hardworking creators and doers. If you’re looking to have a direct impact on a Series B fast-scaling company that is revolutionizing an essential industry, read on and apply!

This is a full-time hybrid position based in Boston, MA.

This position requires activities that are subject to US Export Control Laws and require US Citizenship or Green Card Holder.

About the Role 

Step into the role of Principal Software Engineer and serve as a technical force multiplier for our engineering organization. In this high-leverage position, you will look beyond the immediate roadmap to define the architectural vision that will support Paperless Parts for years to come. You will bridge the gap between business strategy and technical execution, ensuring our systems are robust, scalable, and AI-ready.

This role is a powerful catalyst for change and innovation. You will be responsible for modernizing our engineering practices—integrating AI agents into the development lifecycle, driving the evolution from monolithic to a service architecture, and mentoring our engineers to become the next generation of leaders.

Who You Are

• Technical Visionary & Pragmatist: You have a proven track record of evolving complex architectures in scale-up environments. You balance the pursuit of "technical purity" with business reality, making hard trade-offs with incomplete information.
• Force Multiplier: You don't just write great code; you make the entire team better. You are passionate about mentorship and teaching others effective patterns for design, review, and agentic coding.
• AI Pioneer: You think strategically about how AI agents and workflows can fundamentally change how we build software. You believe that "what is good for humans is good for AI," championing standards that serve both.
• Business Partner: You understand that technical debt is a business risk. You can translate complex infrastructure needs into tangible business value (ROI, reliability, speed) to help leadership prioritize effectively.

Why You'll Love Working Here

• Architectural Authority: You will lead the design of our most critical systems, making high-stakes decisions on migrating to distributed architectures and defining our data strategy.
• Optimizing the AI-Native Workflow: You will have the freedom to operationalize AI at scale—implementing agents for ticket resolution, automated reviews, and documentation—driving significant improvements in modern engineering efficiency.
• High-Impact Work: Our software is used in mission-critical industries like aerospace and defense. The reliability and performance standards you set directly impact the production of life-saving and critical components.
• Culture of Excellence: You will help establish a culture of deep observability and operational maturity, leading the charge on incident management and blameless postmortems.

What You'll Do

• Architect & Evolve: Lead the technical strategy for migrating legacy monolithic patterns to scalable, service architectures. You will define the long-term vision for our backend systems, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.
• Operationalize AI Development: Drive the adoption and continuous improvement of AI-assisted workflows (using tools like Cursor and Claude Code). You will champion the strategic integration of AI agents to enhance autonomous task execution and leverage AI throughout the software life cycle.
• Drive Operational Maturity: Instill a strong focus on reliability and site operations across the team. You will lead initiatives to improve observability (logging, monitoring), define clear runbooks, and facilitate postmortems that turn incidents into structural improvements.
• Elevate Engineering Standards: Enforce "context-first" engineering. You will champion the creation of Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) and high-quality documentation, ensuring our codebase provides the explicit context needed for both human alignment and effective AI agent performance.
• Mentor & Lead: Act as a technical beacon, dedicating significant time (~20%) to pairing, design reviews, and mentoring engineers across different levels to elevate the team's collective skill set.
• Strategic Alignment: Collaborate with R&D leadership to prioritize technical initiatives. You will articulate the ROI of infrastructure investments and technical debt reduction in terms of customer reliability and business agility.

What You'll Bring

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong background in architecting SaaS products at scale (start-up to scale-up transition experience preferred).
• Deep Architectural Expertise: Proven success decomposing monoliths and designing distributed systems, with strong judgment on build-vs-buy decisions and technology selection.
• Modern Stack Proficiency: Expert-level knowledge of modern web frameworks and databases, along with deep experience in AWS cloud-native patterns (containers, serverless).
• AI/LLM Fluency: Practical experience leveraging LLMs and AI agents in a production engineering workflow. You understand prompt engineering, context limits, and how to structure codebases for AI interpretability.
• Operational Rigor: A strong commitment to production reliability, with experience designing systems for observability and leading incident response processes.
• Communication Mastery: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and influence decisions without relying on authority.

Why Join Us?

• Impactful Work: Your contributions will power industries critical to our society and economy, making a real difference.
• Continuous Learning: We invest in our people and offer opportunities to learn, grow, and advance their careers.
• Supportive Culture: Our team is our greatest asset, and we foster an environment where everyone can thrive.

If you’re a forward-thinking engineer eager to make a significant impact while working with a talented, driven team, we’d love to hear from you!

Salary range:  $212,000 - $286,000