Principal Software Engineer, AI Email App
The Principal Software Engineer will lead a team to build a reliable, AI-native email application by designing backend and client-side architectures that integrate LLM capabilities. This hands-on role involves managing complex workflows, ensuring system reliability, and partnering with ML leadership to deliver a high-quality product.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- United States
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems
- Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production
- Experience building AI-powered products or systems that integrate with modern ML/LLM capabilities
- Strong technical judgment and the ability to make decisions with incomplete information
- Comfortable working across backend and client platforms, with deep expertise in at least one
- A strong bias toward ownership, shipping, and learning from real-world usage
- High standards for code quality, reliability, and engineering fundamentals
Full description
About the Role
There are over 5 billion users using basic applications today such email, notes, tasks, calendar and they're not AI-native. Our mission is to build proactive applications for anyone in the world, who are not used to complex prompting. We aim to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organising and workflows, with minimal to no prompting.
Our first application is an agent-first mobile communication app. We believe building applications that users use daily for communication, coordination and collaboration needs will help integrate AI into their lives. The net effect is to eliminate misinformation, achieve low coordination costs, enable high quality tasks and collaboration at scale with minimal or little prompting.
Our objective is to organise anyone's life, allowing us all to spend time on valuable and meaningful things
As Principal Software Engineer, AI Email App, you own the engineering layer that turns AI capability into a reliable product. You will shape the architecture across backend services, APIs, and client applications, while leading a small team of senior engineers.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.
What You'll Own
- Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
- Design reliable systems for AI-powered workflows, including state, orchestration, tool use, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
- Build the APIs and abstractions that connect AI systems to real-world product experiences.
- Lead a small, senior engineering team and raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship.
- Make high-impact trade-offs across latency, reliability, cost, security, and user experience.
- Establish strong production foundations: observability, monitoring, testing, and operational excellence.
- Partner closely with ML leadership to turn model capabilities into robust, shippable product experiences.
- Move quickly while keeping the architecture simple, maintainable, and ready to scale.
What We're Looking For
- Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
- Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.
- Experience building AI-powered products or systems that integrate with modern ML/LLM capabilities.
- Strong technical judgment and the ability to make decisions with incomplete information.