# Principal Software Engineer, Platform
**Company:** [PermitFlow](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/permitflow)
As Principal Software Engineer, Platform at PermitFlow, you will architect and evolve the entire platform infrastructure to support AI agent-driven development while maintaining system quality and reliability. You'll design monorepo structure optimized for autonomous agents, build scalable platform foundations including shared services and CI/CD systems, and establish engineering practices that enable agents and humans to collaborate effectively. This role requires deep expertise in large-scale codebase architecture, platform engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and proven success working agent-first in production environments.
**Role:** Principal Engineer
**Seniority:** Principal
**Locations:** New York City, NY
**Salary:** 250000–300000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/permitflow/454c26bc-d100-4211-95aa-5ef5c0c1cdc3)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/permitflow/principal-software-engineer-platform
---
## Responsibilities

- Architect Codebase Evolution: Own and evolve the complete platform architecture, establishing module boundaries, domain abstractions, and coding patterns across the monorepo. Lead major refactoring initiatives and architectural migrations that raise code quality standards and enable organizational scaling. Set architectural principles that guide all engineering teams' implementation decisions.
- Design Agent-First Monorepo Structure: Structure packages, ownership models, build graphs, and conventions specifically optimized for AI agent autonomy. Ensure agents can efficiently discover relevant context, make scoped changes with precision, and verify implementations without requiring full codebase comprehension. Enable agents to work safely and independently within clearly defined boundaries.
- Build Platform Infrastructure Substrate: Own and maintain shared services, infrastructure components, and paved paths that product teams depend upon. Deliver robust abstractions for data access patterns, background job processing, multi-environment management, and production observability. Ensure platform capabilities scale reliably to support agent-driven and human development.
- Define Agentic Software Development Lifecycle: Establish and continuously evolve processes, tooling, and guardrails that manage work flowing from tickets to production when agents perform substantial development, testing, and code review. Set organizational defaults for agent capabilities, human review requirements, and quality gates. Adapt practices as AI models and development tools improve.
- Scale Code Verification and Quality Gates: Architect AI-assisted code review systems, intelligent test generation frameworks, and advanced CI pipeline gates that maintain high confidence in merges as pull request volume scales dramatically. Strategically determine where human review remains essential versus where automated verification suffices. Balance velocity with reliability.
- Deploy Background Agent Systems: Architect and deploy autonomous agents for well-defined operational tasks including ticket triage and completion, flaky test resolution, dependency management and automated upgrades, large-scale code migrations, and incident response through automated fix generation. Expand agent productivity while maintaining safety and correctness.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent discipline preferred. Alternatively, demonstrated equivalent professional achievement and expertise in software architecture and engineering leadership."}

### technical

- {"name":"Large-Scale Codebase Architecture","description":"Proven track record owning the complete architecture of large, multi-team codebases with hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code. Demonstrated expertise setting module boundaries, establishing coding patterns, and making architectural decisions that scale across entire organizations."}
- {"name":"Monorepo Tooling and Management","description":"Deep hands-on experience operating monorepo tooling including Nx, Turborepo, Bazel, or comparable systems. Ability to configure build graphs, optimize incremental builds, manage dependency resolution, and run successful large-scale migrations to new monorepo architectures."}
- {"name":"Platform and Infrastructure Engineering","description":"Advanced expertise in cloud infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code frameworks, CI/CD pipeline design and implementation, production observability and monitoring, and managing services through real incidents and outages in production environments."}
- {"name":"Full-Stack Product Engineering","description":"Ability to design and implement across the complete technology stack from data models and backend systems to frontend implementations and user interfaces. Comfort working across traditional layer boundaries when architectural objectives require full-stack solutions."}
- {"name":"AI Agent-First Development Practices","description":"Current, hands-on experience with AI code generation agents as primary development tools. Substantial portion of personal code shipped through autonomous agents. Specific, battle-tested opinions on agent limitations, contextual requirements, and how codebase structure enables or inhibits agent effectiveness."}
- {"name":"Agentic AI Stack and Tools","description":"Practical knowledge of AI agent architecture and capabilities as applied to software engineering tasks. Understanding of context engineering principles, agent instruction design, Model Context Protocol (MCP), sandboxed execution environments, and evaluation frameworks for assessing AI-generated code quality and correctness."}

### experience

- {"name":"15+ Years Software Engineering","description":"Minimum 15 years of professional software engineering experience across diverse problem domains and technology stacks. Demonstrated career progression into technical leadership roles with increasing scope and complexity."}
- {"name":"Multi-Team Technical Direction","description":"Proven experience setting technical direction, establishing standards, and influencing engineering practices across multiple teams and business units. Track record of successfully implementing organizational-level technical initiatives and migrations."}
- {"name":"Production Infrastructure Management","description":"Hands-on experience building and maintaining services in production environments. Real-world incident response experience, ability to debug complex system-level issues, and demonstrated judgment in balancing reliability with velocity."}
- {"name":"Architectural Decision Making","description":"Experience making large-scale architectural decisions with long-term implications, considering trade-offs between competing concerns like developer experience, system performance, operational complexity, and organizational scaling."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Software Architecture","description":"Expert-level architecture design including module boundaries, layered abstractions, domain-driven design, and system composition patterns. Ability to evaluate architectural trade-offs and communicate decisions through design documentation and implementation."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code","description":"Proficiency with IaC frameworks for cloud infrastructure management. Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or equivalent tools for defining reproducible infrastructure environments and managing infrastructure changes through version control."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Pipeline Architecture","description":"Experience designing and implementing comprehensive continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Expertise in build automation, test orchestration, deployment strategies, and operational workflows at scale."}
- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"Deep understanding of monitoring, logging, and tracing frameworks for production systems. Experience implementing observability for complex distributed systems, debugging production issues, and establishing alerting strategies."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Understanding of distributed system principles, trade-offs between consistency and availability, eventual consistency patterns, and designing for reliability and scalability at scale."}
- {"name":"AI/ML Systems Understanding","description":"Understanding of machine learning systems, LLM capabilities and limitations, AI agent architecture, prompt engineering, and how to structure software systems to work effectively with AI-generated components."}
- {"name":"System Performance Optimization","description":"Ability to identify performance bottlenecks, profile applications, optimize algorithms and data structures, and make trade-off decisions between performance and maintainability."}
- {"name":"Technical Leadership","description":"Ability to influence through demonstrated expertise, clear technical communication, and working code examples. Comfortable setting technical direction, making decisive calls on complex trade-offs, and building consensus around architectural decisions."}

### preferred

- {"name":"LLM and AI Agent Experience","description":"Personal experience building systems using large language models and autonomous AI agents. Understanding of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and prompt optimization for specific domains like software engineering tasks."}
- {"name":"Open Source Contributions","description":"Contributions to large-scale open source projects, particularly infrastructure, build tools, or development infrastructure projects. Demonstrates ability to design APIs and abstractions that serve diverse external users."}
- {"name":"Construction Technology Domain","description":"Experience in construction, real estate technology, or regulatory compliance domains. Understanding of construction industry workflows, permitting processes, or compliance requirements provides valuable context."}
- {"name":"Startup Experience","description":"Previous experience at high-growth venture-backed startups, particularly in technical leadership roles. Understanding of balancing technical quality with startup velocity and resource constraints."}
- {"name":"Database Architecture","description":"Deep expertise in relational and non-relational database design, query optimization, scaling databases to large data volumes, and selecting appropriate database technologies for specific use cases."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Cloud Platforms","description":"AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure expertise for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure at scale. Familiarity with containerization platforms including Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Platforms","description":"GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or comparable continuous integration systems. Expertise building, testing, and deploying software through automated pipelines with appropriate quality gates and approval workflows."}
- {"name":"Observability Stack","description":"Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, ELK Stack, or comparable monitoring and logging platforms. Expertise implementing logging strategies, metrics collection, distributed tracing, and alerting."}
- {"name":"Version Control","description":"Git and GitHub for distributed version control, branch management, and collaborative development. Proficiency with pull request workflows, code review processes, and merge strategies."}
- {"name":"Container Orchestration","description":"Kubernetes or Docker Compose for managing containerized applications. Understanding of container networking, service discovery, storage, and orchestration patterns."}

### others

- {"name":"AI Code Generation Agents","description":"Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude with code generation, or comparable AI-assisted coding tools. Practical experience using AI agents for code generation and understanding how to structure code for agent comprehension."}
- {"name":"Model Context Protocol (MCP)","description":"Understanding of MCP specification for creating AI-agent-compatible tool integrations. Ability to design agent instructions and skills that enable autonomous systems to interact with development tools and codebases."}
- {"name":"API Design and Documentation","description":"RESTful API design principles, GraphQL, or gRPC for service communication. OpenAPI/Swagger documentation for API specification and client generation. Experience designing stable, versioned APIs supporting multiple clients."}
- {"name":"Documentation and Technical Communication","description":"Ability to write clear architectural decision records (ADRs), design documents, and technical specifications. Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical concepts to diverse audiences including engineers and non-technical stakeholders."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Relational database for structured data, transactions, and complex queries. Industry standard for production systems requiring ACID properties and complex data relationships."}
- {"name":"Data Warehousing/Analytics","description":"Experience with data warehouse platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift for analytics workloads. Understanding of analytical queries and data aggregation for business intelligence and observability."}
- {"name":"Redis/Caching Layers","description":"In-memory data stores for caching, session management, and real-time data processing. Critical for performance optimization in high-throughput systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Modern JavaScript ecosystem technologies for full-stack development. TypeScript for type-safe backend and frontend code, Node.js runtime, and ecosystem tooling for build automation and development infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Python for infrastructure automation, data processing, AI/ML integration, and backend services. Common in modern software engineering for scripting, testing frameworks, and AI agent implementation."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Modern Web Frameworks","description":"React, Vue, or comparable frontend frameworks for building user interfaces and single-page applications. Backend frameworks like Express, FastAPI, or Django depending on language choice and architectural requirements."}
- {"name":"Monorepo Build Systems","description":"Nx, Turborepo, Bazel, or comparable monorepo management frameworks. Essential for structuring large codebases, managing build dependencies, and enabling incremental builds and testing across thousands of packages."}
- {"name":"Testing Frameworks","description":"Jest, Vitest, Pytest, or comparable unit testing frameworks. Integration testing frameworks and E2E testing tools like Cypress or Playwright for comprehensive test coverage across application layers."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Healthcare Coverage","description":"100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees, eliminating out-of-pocket premium costs. Healthcare FSA support for pre-tax healthcare expense management."}
- {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"401(k) savings plan with employer matching for long-term wealth building and retirement security."}
- {"name":"Unlimited Paid Time Off","description":"Flexible unlimited PTO policy enabling work-life balance and burnout prevention. Encourages sustainable pace and time for rest, learning, and personal pursuits."}
- {"name":"Paid Family Leave","description":"Comprehensive paid family leave supporting major life events and family responsibilities without financial burden."}
- {"name":"Home Office and Equipment Support","description":"Stipend for home office setup, ergonomic equipment, and ongoing technology needs supporting remote work days and comfortable working environment."}
- {"name":"Daily In-Office Meals","description":"Complimentary breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided daily in the NYC office. Eliminates meal planning burden for in-office days and fosters team connection and collaboration."}
- {"name":"Commuter Benefits","description":"Pre-tax transit and parking benefits reducing commuting costs and supporting sustainable transportation options for NYC-based employees."}
- {"name":"Meaningful Equity","description":"Significant stock options in a high-growth, well-funded company ($90M+ raised from top-tier investors). Direct financial upside tied to company success and team contributions."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 450000
- **min:** 280000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
PermitFlow is redefining how America builds. We’re an applied AI company serving the nation’s builders, tackling one of the largest information challenges in the economy: understanding _what can be built, where, and how_. Our AI agent workforce helps the fastest-growing construction companies navigate everything from permitting and licensing to inspections and project closeouts – accelerating housing, clean-energy, and infrastructure development across the country.

Despite being a $1.6T industry, construction still suffers from massive delays, wasted capital, and lost opportunity. PermitFlow has already delivered unprecedented speed, accuracy, and visibility to over $20B in development, helping contractors reduce compliance time, de-risk projects, and scale with confidence.

As the U.S. enters a new capex supercycle across data centers, factories, housing, and renewables, joining PermitFlow means building the AI infrastructure at the core of every construction project driving the next wave of reindustrialization.

We’ve raised over $90M, most recently completing our [Series B,](https://www.permitflow.com/blog/permitflow-series-b) from top-tier investors including Accel, [Kleiner Perkins](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401703305569275904/), Initialized, Y Combinator, Felicis, and Altos Ventures, with backing from leaders at OpenAI, Google, Procore, ServiceTitan, Zillow, PlanGrid, and Uber.

**Our HQ is in New York City with a hybrid schedule (3 in-office days per week). We prefer NYC-based candidates or those open to relocation.**

# Role Overview

We’re hiring a Principal Engineer to own the evolution of our architecture and platform so it works for agents as well as people. Our goal is simple: double the output of our entire organization while raising the quality bar. The scope is the whole platform. You’ll work across infrastructure, shared services, and product code, and step in as a product engineer anywhere in the stack when that is the fastest way to move.

The ideal candidate is deep in code architecture and platform engineering, already works agent-first, and has built foundations that other teams adopted because they were better. This role reports directly to our VP of Engineering.

# What You'll Do

* Own the architecture of our codebase. Set the patterns, module boundaries, and domain abstractions across our monorepo, and lead the refactors and migrations that get us there.
* Design the monorepo for agents. Structure packages, ownership, the build graph, and conventions so an agent can find the right context, make a scoped change, and verify it without reading the whole repo.
* Build the platform substrate. Own the shared services, infrastructure, and paved paths (data access, background jobs, environments, observability) that product teams build on and agents can use safely.
* Own the agentic SDLC. Define how work moves from ticket to production when agents do much of the writing, testing, and reviewing. Set the defaults every team builds on, and change them as models and tools improve.
* Scale verification with volume. Build AI-assisted code review, test generation, and CI gates so confidence to merge keeps pace as PR volume doubles. Decide where human review is required and where it is not.
* Put agents to work in the background. Stand up agents that pick up well-scoped tickets, triage flaky tests, run dependency upgrades and large migrations, and draft fixes from incidents and error reports.

# What We're Looking For

* You've owned the architecture of a large, multi-team codebase. You've set the module boundaries and patterns others build within, run monorepo tooling (Nx, Turborepo, Bazel, or similar), and led migrations that changed how a whole org works.
* Strong platform and infrastructure depth: cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and services you've run in production through real incidents.
* You can work across the stack as a product engineer, from data model to UI, and you're happy to do it.
* You work agent-first today. A large share of the code you ship comes from AI coding agents, and you have specific, earned opinions on where they break and how codebase structure fixes that.
* Current knowledge of the agentic stack as it applies to software engineering: context engineering, agent instructions and skills, MCP, sandboxed execution, and how to evaluate a coding agent's output.
* You operate with earned authority. You influence through demonstrated judgment, working code, and clear writing rather than title or mandate.
* 15+ years of software engineering experience, including time setting technical direction across multiple teams.

# What We Offer

* Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth company
* 100% company-paid base medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees + healthcare FSA
* 401(k) savings plan
* Unlimited PTO and paid family leave
* Home office & equipment stipend
* Daily in-office lunch and dinner provided
* Commuter benefits (pre-tax transit and parking)

_PermitFlow provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or family status, as protected by applicable law._

  
_We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities. All employment decisions are based on merit, qualifications, and business needs._