Principal Software Engineer

About This Role

This deeply hands-on technical leadership role involves solving complex problems, writing production code, and elevating the engineers around them. The Principal Software Engineer serves as the senior engineering voice across a portfolio of mission-critical clinical decision-support applications that combine low-latency distributed architectures with advanced LLM, OCR, and ML pipelines running on Google Cloud. This is an active role focused on designing systems, writing critical code, shipping to production, supporting live environments, and mentoring engineers across UI, backend, and ML.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and execution, leading the technical direction of a real-time, multi-service clinical platform on GCP, while personally building the most critical and performance-sensitive components
• Build production-grade LLM systems, designing and operating scalable LLM pipelines (e.g., Claude, Gemini, GPT-4-class) including prompt engineering, structured outputs, evaluation frameworks, retrieval/vector search, OCR-based document understanding, grounding, guardrails, and hallucination mitigation
• Deliver real-time, high-performance systems, architecting distributed, event-driven, streaming services that support sub-second clinician experiences under heavy load, with strict SLOs and strong fault tolerance
• Operationalize machine learning, leading deployment and lifecycle management of models on Vertex AI, including feature pipelines, model registries, drift detection, A/B and shadow testing, and CI/CD-integrated quality controls
• Design for scalability and change, building flexible APIs, microservices, and data contracts that support rapid iteration, backed by strong testing, observability, and progressive delivery practices
• Raise the engineering bar, driving high-quality code reviews, establishing standards across testing, CI/CD, security, and observability, and mentoring engineers across full-stack and ML disciplines
• Own outcomes end-to-end, translating ambiguous clinical and business needs into delivered solutions, monitoring real-world performance, and continuously iterating based on data
• Partner across disciplines, collaborating with Data Science, Product, Clinical SMEs, AI Governance, and Security teams to ensure solutions meet enterprise standards for compliance, privacy, and safety

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong record of delivering production systems at scale
• 5+ years as a hands-on Staff or Principal-level engineer (actively coding, not removed from implementation)
• Expert proficiency in Python including performance tuning, concurrency, and system optimization
• 5+ years building real-time distributed systems (event-driven, streaming, Pub-Sub) with clear latency and reliability requirements
• 5+ years working in a major public cloud (GCP preferred: Vertex AI, GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, IAM, etc.)