Principal Software Engineer

Standard Template Labs is a stealth-mode AI-native startup reimagining the future of IT Service and Configuration Management. Backed by leading investors we're leveraging AI graph-based architecture and exceptional design to transform how enterprises manage and engage with their technology ecosystems.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer Full-Stack AI to own the end-to-end technical vision for how intelligence is designed built and experienced across our platform - from data ingestion and model reasoning to APIs user interfaces and real-world operational impact.

This is a deeply hands-on role for a senior technical leader who thrives at the intersection of AI systems distributed infrastructure and product-grade software engineering. You will architect and ship production AI systems build scalable backend and data platforms and work across the stack to ensure AI capabilities are observable trustworthy and intuitive for enterprise users.

You’ll help us define what “applied full-stack AI” means at Standard Template Labs: designing reasoning pipelines operationalizing LLMs and agents shaping human-in-the-loop experiences and building the platform primitives that allow intelligence to be embedded - not bolted on - across every workflow. You’ll mentor senior engineers influence product direction and help establish an engineering culture where AI systems design and user experience are tightly integrated.

• Architect the core intelligence layer of the platform spanning data ingestion embeddings retrieval graph reasoning agents and real-time inference.

• Define how LLMs and predictive models integrate across backend services APIs and user-facing experiences.

• Identify high-impact opportunities where generative predictive or autonomous AI can eliminate operational toil improve system understanding or enhance decision-making.

• Lead architectural decisions around model selection evaluation fine-tuning and inference infrastructure (custom vs OSS vs managed APIs).

• Establish best practices for AI-first engineering including prompt and schema design context assembly evaluators guardrails observability and continuous model monitoring.

• Partner with product and leadership to align AI capabilities with customer outcomes trust requirements and long-term platform strategy.

• Build end-to-end AI-powered features - from backend reasoning services to APIs and user-facing workflows.

• Design and implement production-grade LLM and agent workflows including automated enrichment anomaly explanation topology discovery change impact analysis and natural language querying.

• Develop scalable backend systems for high-throughput inference embedding generation vector search and graph traversal.

• Collaborate on or directly contribute to frontend experiences that make AI outputs understandable actionable and debuggable for users (e.g. explanations confidence signals provenance and feedback loops).

• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and hybrid search systems that combine structured data graphs and unstructured context.

• Write clean well-structured production-quality code—and champion AI-assisted development tools (Claude Cursor Windsurf etc.) to improve velocity and correctness.

• Continuously evaluate emerging AI frameworks agent runtimes orchestration tools and model APIs integrating them where they drive real user value.

• Design data models and pipelines that support learning reasoning and traceability across the platform.

• Build and evolve distributed systems that are observable fault-tolerant and cost-efficient under AI workloads.

• Partner with infrastructure and DevOps teams to shape deployment scaling monitoring and rollback strategies for AI-driven services.

• Ensure AI systems meet enterprise requirements for reliability security explainability and compliance.

• Mentor engineers on full-stack AI patterns system design for AI workloads and practical approaches to shipping intelligent features.

• Lead architecture reviews and technical deep-dives focused on reliability safety performance and user trust.

• Influence engineering standards and culture emphasizing craftsmanship clarity and ownership across the stack.

• Help attract and develop top-tier engineering talent excited about AI-native product-driven systems.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience including technical leadership in complex high-scale systems.

• Proven experience architecting and shipping distributed systems with meaningful AI automation or intelligent decisioning components.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs embeddings vector databases RAG pipelines agent frameworks or model integration patterns.

• Strong system design skills across APIs data modeling event-driven architectures caching storage and performance optimization.

• Comfort working across the stack including backend services and collaboration on user-facing or API-layer design.

• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Go Rust Python Java or C++).

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving engineering best practices.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and modern DevOps/tooling.

• Experience operationalizing ML or LLM workloads in production at scale.

• Background in microservices event-driven systems or real-time data pipelines.

• Exposure to frontend frameworks or strong product intuition around AI UX.

• Experience with high-throughput low-latency or mission-critical systems.

• Open-source contributions or demonstrated technical leadership in distributed systems or AI tooling.

This is a rare opportunity to define and build the foundations of a truly AI-native full-stack enterprise platform—one where intelligence spans data infrastructure and user experience and where reasoning systems are core to how customers understand and operate their technology.

You won’t just integrate models - you’ll shape how humans and intelligent systems collaborate at scale.

• The opportunity to architect foundational systems for an AI-first enterprise platform.

• Ownership over critical high-impact systems that scale to millions of users.

• A culture that values craftsmanship autonomy and technical excellence.

• Competitive compensation equity and a comprehensive benefits package.

As an equal opportunity employer we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race ethnicity age gender identity citizenship religion sexual orientation disability pregnancy veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal state or local laws. The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at is: $200000—$250000 USD.

What We Do

We’re on a mission to reinvent IT Service Management from the ground up. In an industry dominated by outdated bloated tools we believe it’s time for a clean slate — modern efficient and built with the end-user in mind. Our goal is to create software that teams actually want to use — tools that accelerate productivity instead of slowing it down. With deep product expertise strong backing and a bold vision we’re building a next-generation ITSM platform designed for the way companies work today and tomorrow. No legacy baggage. No compromises. Just smart scalable high-performance software that redefines what IT service can be.

Why Work With Us

Backed by leading investors we're leveraging AI graph-based architecture and exceptional design to transform how enterprises manage and engage with their technology ecosystems.

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