Principal Software Engineer, Paperless Parts
$212-286k
Estimating & quoting for manufacturing
Be an early applicant
Estimating & quoting for manufacturing
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$212-286k
101-200 employees
Company mission
To make manufacturing more accessible.
Role
Who you are
- This position requires activities that are subject to US Export Control Laws and require US Citizenship or Green Card Holder
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
The creation of bespoke components for manufacturing processes can be time-consuming to manage and difficult to price. Typically, job shops and contract manufacturers have used paper trails to forecast component creation and provide quotes for their clients - meaning the process is ripe for modernization.
Paperless Parts provides an estimating and quoting software platform for manufacturers and job shops, focusing on eradicating paperwork from the process. The platform organizes quote information into a single point of knowledge for all parties, using this data to automate manual steps.
With this approach, the company says it's cutting costs, speeding up how components get deployes, and keeping everything secure and cmpliant along with way. And it seems to be working, as its now setting its sights on expanding into the Canadian and Mexican market, aiming to take its success even further.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Sep 2021
$30m
SERIES B
Jan 2021
$7.2m
SEED
Total funding: $37.2m
Company benefits
- Healthcare, dental, and vision: We cover 100% of Health, Dental, and Vision premiums for employees and their immediate families with multiple plan options available
- Wellness and relaxation: We want you to decompress and relax in a way that is best for you. From a Peloton membership to rock climbing, to massages, we’ll cover some of your costs
- Unlimited PTO: We recognize that our team works hard and ask that you take time when you need it
- Training and development: Attend conferences, classes, and trainings to hone your skills
Company HQ
Financial District, Boston, MA
Leadership
Jason T. Ray
(Co-Founder & CEO)Supply Corps Officer Department Head, Navy Acquisition Contracting Officer, and Additive Manufacturing Lead for the US Navy from 2009 to 2016.
Scott Sawyer
(Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)Experience as Associate Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 2011 to 2014. VP of Engineering for ecovent Systems from 2014 to 2016.
Salary benchmarks
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