Principal Backend Software Engineer

Remote

Company Overview

harpin AI is a high-growth, seed-stage startup on a mission to close the gap between what your data holds and what your business can achieve. We help enterprise teams unlock the revenue potential of their existing CRM, loyalty, and support systems — without replacing a thing.

Built by a proven team with decades of experience in CX, marketing, and data systems, harpin AI was born from a clear market truth: businesses are sitting on massive amounts of valuable data — but most of it goes unused. Fragmented tools, messy data, and dashboards that don’t drive action create a wall between insights and outcomes.

We created harpin AI to tear that wall down.

Instead of another dashboard or CDP, we built a set of modular, AI-powered tools that activate the systems you already use — fueling faster decisions, smarter customer experiences, and measurable ROI. Whether it's identifying at-risk customers, surfacing churn signals, or launching campaigns with validated segments, harpin AI turns data from a liability into a competitive advantage.

Our customers span retail, hospitality, and gaming, and use harpin AI to drive growth in days — not quarters. If you’re excited about joining a sharp, decisive, purpose-driven team that’s redefining what data can do, we’d love to meet you.

Position Overview

As a Principal Backend Software Engineer at harpin AI, you’ll be at the forefront of revolutionizing how enterprises unlock value from their existing data infrastructure. This is a rare opportunity to join a proven, well-funded startup, where your technical expertise will directly shape the backbone of AI-powered tools that rapidly turn unused enterprise data into competitive advantages.

In this role, you will design and implement scalable backend systems that meet enterprise-grade reliability standards (99.9%+ uptime), provide technical guidance across the engineering organization, and collaborate directly with clients to solve complex integration challenges.  You will make an immediate impact from day one, leveraging AI-powered development tools and your expertise as an experienced engineer to accelerate delivery of key features in the harpin AI toolkit.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture Implementation

• Contribute to establishing architectural standards and engineering best practices across backend engineering initiatives
• Design and implement backend systems, APIs, and integrations following established platform architecture principles
• Provide technical guidance and code review support for backend engineers
• Support technical decision-making for platform components while ensuring alignment with broader architecture standards

AI-Driven Development & Engineering Excellence

• Promote adoption of AI-powered development tools within backend engineering, including code generation, automated testing, and debugging assistance
• Implement AI-assisted workflows to improve engineering velocity and code quality
• Help train engineers on effective use of AI development tools and best practices
• Assist in research and evaluation of new AI-powered engineering tools

Platform Development & Reliability

• Develop and maintain backend services and platform components
• Ensure systems meet reliability targets (99.9%+ uptime) and performance standards through quality design and implementation
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and response capabilities for platform services
• Follow and ensure compliance with security best practices when developing and maintaining backend services and components
• Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineers to optimize system performance and support operational excellence
• Participate in incident response and resolution for technical issues within your domain

Client Services Support

• Provide technical support and guidance for client-specific backend development work
• Ensure client solutions adhere to platform standards and maintain scalability requirements
• Work with services teams to optimize integration patterns and support client onboarding processes
• Support technical discussions with enterprise clients when backend expertise is needed
• Build reusable components and patterns that can be leveraged across client implementations

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Frontend teams to ensure effective feature delivery and integration
• Provide technical input for feature feasibility assessments and development effort estimation
• Write and maintain documentation for APIs and other components to facilitate collaboration across teams and ensure smooth adoption of backend service functionality
• Support engineering leadership with technical planning and architectural input
• Participate as technical contributor in engineering discussions and help represent backend engineering perspectives in cross-functional meetings

Qualifications

• 10 or more years of relevant industry experience required.
• Experience with two or more development languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python.
• You can skillfully write high-quality, well-tested code and you are comfortable with object-oriented programming.
• Experience working with a variety of persistence technologies such as PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Kafka.
• Good working knowledge of cloud-native architectures, at least one of the major cloud providers, and containerization technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience with using AI-powered coding assistants such as Cline, Cursor, or Copilot, to expedite various aspects of the development process.
• Comfortable using different prompt engineering techniques to build product functionality based on LLMs.
• Strong presence; good communicator and highly influential both externally (with customers and partners) as well as internally at the executive level and across the organization.
• Flexible, nimble, and scrappy; startup mentality and willingness/ability to change direction quickly if best for the business.
• Experience working with data engineering and ML infrastructure such as model development and deployment, feature creation and storage, and data labeling.

Benefits

• Stock Options
• PTO
• Paid Holidays
• Medical, Dental, & Vision Benefits
• 401K