Principal Software Engineer

PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER - FULLSTACKCOMPANY : STEVEN.COMREPORTING TO : VP of ENGINEERINGLOCATION: LOS ANGELESSALARY: £185KABOUT STEVEN.COMSteven.com is building the operating system for the creator economy, forecast to pass a trillion dollars by the early 2030's. This industry is currently held back by fragmented tools and a lack of professional infrastructure. Steven.com is the unlock. We are the end-to-end Operating System designed to scale what is irreplaceably human. We have built proprietary technology and obsessed teams to identify and scale the highest-potential creators across our core pillars:Creator Media: Amplifying reach, influence, and trustCreator Community: Transforming audiences into connected tribesCreator Products: Providing creators with the infrastructure to build and back aligned products and venturesPowered by Creator Tech & Intelligence: A proprietary data and technology suite that fuels smarter decisions and drives innovation across the entire flywheelPowering all of it is Steven.com's Innovation and Technology Organisation (ITO). We are building proprietary AI infrastructure, developing consumer and enterprise digital products, and creating the data and intelligence layer that drives smarter decisions across the business. Each pillar feeds the next. The result is a flywheel that compounds over time and bets on human creation at its core.ROLE MISSIONThe most senior individual contributor engineering seat at Steven.com. You set the technical bar for the whole engineering team, own architecture for the ITO's hardest and highest-stakes systems, and make the calls that don't have a committee to hide behind. Reporting to the CITO and partnering closely with the VP of Engineering & Applied AI, you own technical depth while they own execution and people. Founding team role. What you build in year one shapes the product for years.KEY OUTCOMESOwn the architecture of Steven.com's most complex systems, from design through production and long-term evolutionSet the engineering standards, patterns, and abstractions the rest of the team builds onArchitect the AI-native core of the product: LLM-powered workflows, intelligent pipelines, and agentic systems that don't exist yetMake the final call on high-stakes design decisions and catch systemic risk before it becomes debt or downtimeMentor senior and junior engineers, raise the bar through code review and architectural conversationTurn ambiguous product bets into concrete technical plans with clear tradeoffs, working directly with CITO, VP Eng, and ProductCORE COMPETENCIESTrack record of designing and shipping complex, large-scale distributed systems in production, not just contributing to someone else'sDeep full-stack proficiency: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, and Google Cloud/AWSReal experience architecting AI/ML systems, LLM applications, or intelligent pipelines at production scaleComfortable reasoning across levels of abstraction at once, from API design to infrastructure to productSharp written communication, documentation a team can build from and an exec can understandYOU’LL THRIVE HERE IFYou see the whole system and never touch a component without understanding what it's connected toYou reason from first principles, not analogy, and you'll challenge inherited architecture if the foundations are wrongYou know when to be precise and when to be fast, and you make that call on purposeYou have a real point of view on where AI infrastructure is headingYou treat architectural decisions as close to permanent, so you document them properly and don't make them lightlyYou're intellectually honest: you push back early, surface problems fast, and change your mind when the evidence says toIDEAL BACKGROUNDFounding engineer, staff engineer, or technical lead at a startup or high-growth companyCS or ML research background with production research experiencePublished research, open source work, conference talks, or other visible engineering community contributionWe care less about titles, years, and pedigree, and more about the systems you can point to and defend end to end