Principal Engineer Lead - EdTech - AI

Title: Principal Engineer Lead

**FULLY REMOTE**

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal Engineer Lead to drive the design and development of AI-driven educational products. This is an individual contributor role for an experienced engineer who can take ownership of complex systems, provide technical leadership, and influence team delivery and effectiveness. You will operate with autonomy, move fast, and directly impact the product, building services and data pipelines that support analytics, reporting, and product experiences in a cloud-native environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust, secure, and scalable backend services for reporting, analytics, and data delivery.
• Develop across Node.js, Python, .NET, and SQL, supporting data pipelines for internal and external stakeholders.
• Operate within a modern cloud environment, leveraging services such as Lambda, Athena, Glue, DynamoDB, Redshift, and S3.
• Participate in architecture reviews, propose improvements, and proactively identify technical debt or performance bottlenecks.
• Lead AI-native development workflows using LLM-based tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) for rapid prototyping, iteration, and system-level design.
• Define architectural patterns and guardrails for AI-assisted backend systems, including prompt management, cost controls, and evaluation frameworks.
• Coach and mentor engineers in AI-first workflows, fostering team fluency in prompt-driven development.
• Design and maintain shared AI resources like prompt libraries and reusable workflows to raise team productivity.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product owners, engineers, data scientists, and customer teams to define and deliver high-impact solutions.
• Own and continuously improve team delivery flow, including managing work-in-progress, ensuring shippable outcomes, and removing bottlenecks.
  
  

Requirements

• 8 years of backend development experience, building and maintaining production systems.
• Strong expertise in cloud-based architectures, APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized environments.
• Deep knowledge of AWS services (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, CloudFormation) or equivalent cloud platforms.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools and AI-first development workflows.
• Skilled in Node.js, Python, and/or .NET, with experience in relational and NoSQL databases and distributed data pipelines.
• Experience with serverless environments, cloud-native application design, and large-scale data processing frameworks (PySpark, Glue, etc.).
• Strong judgment in evaluating AI-generated code for correctness, performance, and reliability.
• Track record of applying AI to solve real product or data problems, not just internal tooling.
• Strong communicator and collaborator, capable of working in fully remote, asynchronous teams.
• Self-directed, able to work autonomously, and comfortable acting as a hands-on technical lead.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field preferred; strong portfolio and demonstrated ability valued.
  
  

Preferred

• Startup or early-stage experience with ownership of large technical areas.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure, including model serving, RAG architectures, evaluation pipelines, or vector databases.
• Passion for education or improving learning outcomes through technology.
  
  

Posted By: Carly Thomas