Principal Engineer, Architecture

Role Overview

You will be the most senior individual contributor in Moon's engineering organization, with company-wide technical authority, working directly with the VP of Engineering. You will own the toughest problems and the toughest deadlines personally, understand the mechanics of the application in complete detail, and design it for maximized performance, uptime, and security. With the VP of Engineering you will own the overall health of engineering - not by managing people, but by owning the processes, systems, and standards that make every team better. You ship continuously, and you set the standard for what excellent engineering looks like in this organization.

About the role

•   You will join at the moment the foundational architecture decisions get made - the ones the next five years are built on. You have done this before at a high-growth startup that scaled through multiple stages quickly, and you personally laid foundations that survived every stage.

What you'll do

•   Own the architecture of the platform and everything that crosses team boundaries - designed for performance, uptime, and security as first principles.

•   Take the hardest problems and the tightest deadlines yourself, as an IC, and deliver them.

•   Know the application's mechanics in detail: every critical path, every seam, every failure mode.

•   Mentor the engineering team to greatness: code review, design review, pairing, and example - you are the standard others calibrate against.

•   Own engineering health with the VP of Engineering - the processes and systems, not the people management - that keep quality, velocity, and reliability high.

•   Ship continuously: reference implementations, the hardest seams, and the automated guardrails that protect the platform.

•   Make simple things that scale when they need to - and kill elegant things that don't ship.

Qualifications

•   12+ years of engineering with staff/principal scope at high-growth startups; personally scaled systems through multiple company stages.

•   The signal we screen hardest for: practicality. Come ready to tell us about the infinitely-scalable design you rejected in favor of the simple thing that shipped - with specifics.

•   Deep distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and security expertise.

•   A record of mentorship that engineers volunteer unprompted.

•   Writes clearly enough that contracts and design docs replace meetings.