Principal Software Engineer at Dockwa in Remote, United States

Job description

• We are hiring one principal engineer, and we are hiring them to raise the ceiling of what this team can build.
• Engineering is six people today and will be fourteen inside a year. Our surface area is far larger than that: reservations, payments and money movement, dock and slip management, rent roll, boater CRM, service and work orders, accounting integrations, a native iOS app, and now multi-currency for international markets. That math only works if we get dramatically better at building, not just bigger.
• You will rebuild how we build. We treat AI as core development infrastructure, not a side experiment. We want someone who pushes the automation of our development lifecycle much further than it is today, proves it on real production work, and pulls the rest of the team up to that bar.
• You will own the architecture that makes speed safe. We are twelve years into a system carrying real traffic and real money. Going faster only works if the foundation holds while we stack international, enterprise, and new verticals on top of it. You make those structural calls.
• We are not hiring a principal to be the best coder in the room. We are hiring one so that in eighteen months a team of fourteen ships like a team of forty.
• The people who thrive at Dockwa have usually founded something, or joined something early and grew with it. They think in outcomes rather than tickets. They have opinions about the product and the business, not only the code. They would rather ship something a marina operator notices on a Saturday morning than win an argument about abstractions.
• You should want to steer. There is more consequential work here than there are people to do it, which means you will decide what gets built at least as often as you build it.

Responsibilities

• Rebuild how we build, treating AI as core development infrastructure.
• Own the architecture that makes speed safe.
• Raise the ceiling of what the team can build.
• Make structural calls for international, enterprise, and new verticals.
• Steer and decide what gets built at least as often as building it.

Requirements

• Production software you owned outright, end to end, including after it shipped.
• Real AI fluency with receipts. Not tool familiarity. Work you could not have delivered without it.
• Comfort across a full stack. Ours is Rails, React, Postgres, AWS and Swift, but we will take judgment over stack match every time.
• Architectural decisions you had to live with afterwards, in systems you did not originally write.
• Evidence you changed how a team worked, not only what it shipped.

Skills

Required

• Production software ownership
• AI fluency
• Full stack development
• Architectural decision-making
• Team influence