Principal Engineer

About the role

HarborLab is looking for a Principal Engineer to own the technical roadmap, reduce debt, and improve platform reliability. This senior individual‑contributor role reports directly to the CTO and focuses solely on technical excellence without people‑management responsibilities.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the technical roadmap, including debt reduction, reliability, pipelines, observability, and AI‑assisted development.
• Review the product roadmap each quarter, de‑risk technically risky parts, and set enforceable technical standards.
• Raise monitoring, alerting, SLOs and incident response maturity, acting as the escalation tier for production issues.
• Implement and stabilize AI‑driven workflows (e.g., Claude Code) and shape AI tooling adoption across engineering.
• Own security audit realities, performance, and cost headroom, and mentor senior engineers.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software development experience, including 3+ years at Staff/Principal level or as the senior technical voice.
• Hands‑on experience designing and running microservices in a strongly typed backend language.
• Proven track record improving CI/CD, monitoring, and release workflows.
• Daily use of AI tools with a clear stance on their benefits and limitations.

Required skills

• Java 17+ and Spring Boot 3.x
• RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, JPA/Hibernate
• Kubernetes on AWS, Terraform
• Grafana, Prometheus, advanced observability practices
• CI/CD pipelines, SLOs, error budgets, incident management
• AI‑assisted development tools

What we offer

• 30 days paid annual leave
• Comprehensive private health insurance for the whole family
• Hybrid or fully remote work options
• Life coach, kick‑boxing sessions, and fitness centre discounts
• Low‑price high‑quality office lunches