Principal Engineer - Stackpoint Ventures

Job Description

Job Description

About Stackpoint

Stackpoint is a venture studio that conceives, builds, launches, and scales AI-native companies in high-barrier verticals like real estate, construction, hospitality and financial services. Led by co-founders who have both built unicorn real estate tech companies from scratch, we're a tight team of engineers, product managers, designers, and operators with decades of experience building products, teams, and businesses from startup to scale.

We focus all of our energy on discovering and solving customer and business problems, designing financially strong and defensible business models, activating growth engines, hiring world-class founding teams, and helping them thrive (and none of our energy on big-company b.s.). Our dedicated capital, experienced team, proven process, and deep strategic network supercharge founders and accelerate growth. We're based in Boston but have a distributed team, work remotely and come together every quarter for in-person team building.

We're building a pooled, Studio-wide engineering team — and we're looking for principal-level engineers who want to build across an entire portfolio of companies, not just one.

The Role

Context - How the Studio operates: We launch one new company per quarter. For each, we embed a pod — a dedicated PM, Designer, and (in the model we're moving toward) one or more Studio Engineers — for ~6 months alongside a founding CEO we recruit and back. The first three months focus on discovery: identifying the wedge product, assessing technical feasibility, and accumulating design partners. The second three months shift to building the wedge while hiring the company's founding technical team (Head of Engineering, sometimes 1-2 IC engineers or contractors) in parallel. Because launches are staggered quarterly, at any given time the Studio is hands-on in ~2 companies at different stages. Shared resources across Marketing, Sales, Finance, Ops, and Recruiting flex across companies during the first 6-12 months based on what's needed to hit key milestones.

As a Principal Engineer, you are the person who builds. You'll typically embed with a single portfolio company for several months at a time — architecting, coding, and shipping backend systems and responsive frontends from prototype through MVP launch. As that company graduates to its own engineering team, you'll roll onto the next build, bringing compounding experience across domains and tech stacks. You'll partner directly with PMs, designers, and founding CEOs to turn discovery insights into functional software.

This is a hands-on, full-stack IC role. You'll report to the Studio's Head of Engineering and you'll be expected to own entire product surfaces end-to-end: cloud infrastructure, APIs, data pipelines, UIs, and deployment — often on the same product. Technology choices are problem-driven, not preference-driven, and you articulate tradeoffs clearly.

AI-native development is core to how you work. You use tools like Cursor and Claude Code daily, you've integrated LLMs into production systems, and you have hands-on experience with prompt engineering, structured outputs, and cost/performance tradeoffs. You follow the AI landscape actively and make pragmatic adoption decisions.

What You'll Do

Full-Stack Product Development

Architect, build, and ship backend systems and responsive frontends for new products across our portfolio, from prototype through MVP launch.

Infrastructure and DevOps

Stand up cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging, and security foundations for each new product. Make pragmatic infrastructure decisions that balance speed with scalability.

AI-Native Development

Leverage AI coding assistants (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) as core workflow tools. Integrate LLM capabilities into customer-facing products where they create real value — prompt engineering, API integration, cost/performance tradeoff evaluation.

Deep Engagement, Then Rotation

Embed with a portfolio company for the duration of its Studio-led build (typically ~6 months). Own the technical execution alongside the pod. When the company transitions to its own team, roll onto the next build with fresh context and compounding experience.

Product Collaboration

Partner with PMs, designers, and founding CEOs to translate discovery insights into functional software. Contribute to feasibility assessments and help teams understand what's buildable, what's risky, and what's worth a "build to learn" bet.

Technical Transition Support

Help portfolio companies hire their own engineering teams (Head of Engineering, senior ICs) and execute clean handoffs of Studio-built systems within ~6 months of launch.

Studio Tooling and R&D

Contribute to internal tools and reusable frameworks that create compounding leverage across the Studio's company builds.

What We're Looking For

Experience and Background

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful exposure to modern product/engineering cultures and varied company stages
• Multiple 0→1 builds — not just features at established companies, but products built from nothing to launch in startup or early-stage environments
• Comfortable with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and the chaos of pre-product-market-fit development
• Ideally has built across different business models (B2B, B2C, or B2B2C) and can talk concretely about what they learned from each

Technical Breadth

• Full-stack proficiency: strong in both frontend (React, Vue, Angular) and backend (Python, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Go, or Java). Comfortable owning the entire stack
• Cloud infrastructure: hands-on with AWS, GCP, or Azure — can configure environments, deploy services, and make sound platform decisions without a dedicated DevOps team. Willing to use infrastructure-as-code (CDK, Terraform)
• Database design: proficient with SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc.). Can make informed decisions about data modeling and platform selection for new products
• DevOps and CI/CD: experience with Docker, CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab), and basic orchestration. Comfortable setting up the full delivery pipeline from scratch
• AI tooling fluency: actively uses AI-powered development tools in daily work. Experience integrating LLMs into production applications — including prompt engineering, structured outputs, RAG patterns, and evaluating model tradeoffs. Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape

Working Style

• Context-switching is a feature, not a bug. You find variety energizing and ramp fast into new domains, codebases, and team contexts
• Speed and pragmatism define your output. You understand the difference between "build to learn" and "build to scale" and make that call explicitly
• You're a strong cross-functional collaborator who genuinely enjoys working with PMs, designers, and non-technical founders. You translate technical constraints into business language and vice versa
• You're user-led in your thinking but bold enough to advocate for technical bets when you see an opportunity
• You're driven by craft and impact, not title or territory. You care about quality but aren't precious — you'll throw away a prototype without flinching if the team learns something important
• You're low-ego, generous with knowledge, and someone other engineers want to work with

Why This Role Is Different

• Breadth over depth: You'll touch more industries, domains, and technical challenges in a year than most engineers see in five. Real estate, insurance, construction, finance — each portfolio company is a new problem space.
• Build, not maintain: Every engagement is a greenfield build. You're always working on the hardest, most interesting phase of a product's life — the 0→1.
• A real team, not a solo act: You'll work alongside a small, high-caliber engineering team — plus PMs, designers, and operators — who are collaborative, low-ego, and deeply experienced at building from scratch. This isn't a lone-wolf contractor gig; it's a tight team that learns and compounds together.
• Leverage over repetition: Your Studio tooling and R&D contributions don't just serve one product — they accelerate every future company Stackpoint creates.
• Direct impact: You'll work directly with founders, the full Stackpoint Studio team, and portfolio company customers. No layers. No politics. Just building.

Logistics

• Compensation: Competitive base, comprehensive health benefits + equity participation in every company we launch during your time here.
• Location: Flexible within U.S. — we operate remotely.
• Reports to: Studio Head of Engineering.