Senior Principal Engineer

About the Role

This role focuses on delivering AI-powered capabilities that measurably increase brightwheel's value to schools, centers, educators, and families. Success is defined by impact in production, not research or demo building. You will own outcomes end-to-end, from identifying opportunities to shipping, adopting, measuring, iterating, and sustaining improvements.

Responsibilities

• Deliver AI-powered capabilities that move company-level outcomes—for example retention, enrollment conversion, payment success, operational efficiency, and support burden.
• Own outcomes end-to-end, taking responsibility for turning the biggest opportunities into shipped, adopted capabilities with clear measurement, iteration loops, and sustained improvement.
• Define the AI technical direction, translating customer problems into a practical strategy, reference architectures, and a roadmap that multiple product teams can execute against.
• Make build-versus-buy decisions, choosing when to partner on models and tooling versus when to build differentiated capabilities (data flywheels, evaluation systems, workflow-specific intelligence) that create durable advantage.
• Rapidly prototype and ship reference implementations to prove feasibility, de-risk decisions, and raise the organization’s expectation for speed and ambition.
• Build shared foundations—evaluation harnesses, retrieval and context patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and developer experience—so teams can ship reliable AI features repeatedly and independently.
• Mentor senior engineers, lead design reviews, establish standards for quality and safety, and align stakeholders across teams to drive adoption.

Technology Stack

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq
• Data: PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS, Redis, and event and analytics pipelines
• Frontend: React with TypeScript and Emotion
• Mobile: Native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin with Jetpack Compose)
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, GitHub Actions and FluxCD for CI/CD, and AWS services such as S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and SNS
• AI & Automation: AWS Bedrock and other hosted large language models, vector search, orchestration and agent frameworks, and modern AI coding tools like Cursor