Principal Engineer

About the Role

Freemodel is looking for a hands-on principal engineer with deep backend experience to own our AWS backend (primarily Go) and guide a small, high-impact product team. You’ll spend a good chunk of your time in the code, while also setting direction, mentoring 3–4 engineers, and keeping the trains running between mobile (iOS / Flutter) and backend.

We’re leaning heavily into AI across the product and our internal workflows, so you don’t need to be an ML researcher—but you do need to be comfortable with modern AI tools and how to use them to ship faster and smarter.

This is a great fit for someone who likes small teams, end to end ownership, and a mix of “technical leadership + light people management” rather than a pure management role. A big percentage of your time will be spent writing code.

What You’ll Do

• Own the backend stack
• Lead design and implementation of backend services in Go on AWS.
• Make core architecture decisions around serverless vs. containerized services, data stores, and APIs.
• Keep our system reliable, observable, and cost-efficient.
• Lead a small engineering team
• Provide day-to-day technical leadership to a 4–5 person team.
• Help engineers break down work, make tradeoffs, and ship on time.
• Run lightweight processes (standups, planning, retros) without heavy bureaucracy.
• Coordinate across platforms
• Work closely with the engineer who splits time between iOS/Flutter and backend.
• Ensure our APIs, contracts, and releases are smooth for mobile clients.
• Collaborate with product and other stakeholders to clarify requirements and scope.
• Use AI as a force multiplier
• Encourage and model effective use of AI coding and productivity tools.
• Identify where AI can accelerate development, testing, debugging, and documentation.
• Partner with product on pragmatic ways to incorporate AI features into the product.
• Keep things running
• Own production readiness: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems.
• Improve developer experience: CI/CD, infra as code, testing strategies, and tooling.
• Help maintain a healthy engineering culture: clear communication, kindness, high standards.

What We’re Looking For

Must-haves

• Backend engineering depth
• Strong experience building backend services in Go (or strong in a similar language plus a willingness to get deep into Go quickly).
• Solid understanding of modern API design, data modeling, and distributed systems basics, specifically GraphQL.
• Cloud & AWS
• Practical experience deploying and operating systems on AWS.
• Comfort with core services (e.g., Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB/RDS, S3, ECS/Fargate, CloudWatch, IAM).
• Experience with serverless patterns is a plus, but strong AWS experience alone is acceptable.
• Small-team leadership
• Experience leading a small engineering team or being the de-facto tech lead.
• Able to manage priorities, set expectations, and give clear feedback without layers of process.
• Comfortable being both player and coach: writing code most days while also managing people and projects.
• AI-fluent, not an AI skeptic
• Actively uses tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot or similar in real work.
• Understands their strengths/limitations and how to design workflows around them.
• Open-minded and curious about new AI capabilities rather than dismissive.
• Communication & collaboration
• Clear written and verbal communication; can explain tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Low-ego, pragmatic, and comfortable working in a fast-moving environment with incomplete information.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with:
• Flutter or native iOS/Android, or close collaboration with mobile teams.
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, etc.).
• Observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, structured logging, metrics, tracing).
• Security and compliance considerations in cloud environments.
• Prior experience in an early-stage startup or similarly lean environment.
• Product intuition: can contribute to feature shaping, not just implementation.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package to full time employees including:

• 11 holidays
• Unlimited PTO
• Equity options
• We also offer compelling healthcare benefits
• 401(k) plan with match.
• Laptop
• Hybrid work environment

We are a fast-paced, dynamic startup AND we encourage everyone to take the needed time to recharge.

Compensation

The US total compensation range for this full-time position includes a base salary + equity Our ranges are determined by role and level. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the approximate total target compensation for the position across the US. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors including relevant skills, experience, and education/training. Please note that the compensation listed does not include benefits.

Inclusion Statement:

Freemodel deeply values diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe strongly that a variety of perspectives will strengthen us, our product, and our business. We’re committed to seeking out the best talent from all walks of life.

We believe that work shouldn't be everything, but if we’re going to put this much effort into doing what we do, the mission should matter, we should enjoy who we’re with, and we should be in an environment where we’re always learning. We hope you’ll join us.

Who we are:

Freemodel is a comprehensive pre-sales home renovation service that helps homeowners sell for more by renovating before they sell. We design, manage, and pay for pre-sales remodels, and homeowners pay us out of escrow when their homes sell.

Freemodel empowers a growing community of renovation entrepreneurs — folks with interior design and construction project management backgrounds — to build their home renovation businesses on our platform.

Our platform streamlines renovation projects by automating project estimating and scoping, contractor bidding and payments, project underwriting and contracts, and homeowner and agent communications.

Join us as we change how the 5.7 million homes in the US are sold annually, and build the platform that will redefine how the $1.4 trillion dollar home renovation industry works!