Principal Software Engineer - AI & Platform

Salary Range: 150000 to 160000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and evolve architectural standards across customer-facing and operational systems.

• Lead the design of complex software systems, integrations, workflows, and data models.

• Drive long-term technical strategy while balancing short-term business priorities.

• Identify technical risks and opportunities early and develop pragmatic plans to address them.

• Lead architectural reviews and guide major technical decisions across teams.

• Establish patterns that improve reliability, maintainability, scalability, and developer productivity.

AI-Driven Engineering

• Champion AI-assisted software development across the organization.

• Define best practices for leveraging LLMs in coding, testing, debugging, documentation, code review, and operational workflows.

• Design and build agentic systems that automate engineering and business processes.

• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and determine where they can create measurable value.

• Help iterate on Koala's approach to AI-enabled software development and organizational productivity.

• Ensure AI systems are implemented responsibly, securely, and with appropriate operational safeguards.

Engineering Excellence

• Raise the bar for code quality, testing, documentation, and operational readiness.

• Drive improvements in CI/CD, deployment safety, developer experience, and engineering workflows.

• Establish standards for observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.

• Introduce tooling and automation that improve engineering velocity without sacrificing quality.

• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.

Delivery & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product, Operations, Pharmacy, Customer Care, Growth, and Finance teams to understand business challenges and design effective solutions.

• Translate ambiguous business requirements into scalable technical approaches.

• Lead initiatives from concept through implementation, rollout, and operational support.

• Ensure technical decisions align with company goals and customer outcomes.

Mentorship & Organizational Impact

• Help mentor engineers across all experience levels.

• Provide thoughtful guidance through design reviews, architecture discussions, and code reviews.

• Help develop engineering processes that scale as the organization grows.

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to cross-functional stakeholders.

• Influence engineering culture through technical leadership rather than organizational authority.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or equivalent
10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating complex, production-scale systems.
Expert-level Ruby on Rails experience with strong knowledge of modern web application architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Proven experience leading technical architecture, driving engineering direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering reliable, observable, high-performing systems.
Strong product and business judgment with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Deep expertise with modern AI development, including LLMs, AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot), and building AI-powered products, agents, automation, or developer workflows.
Understanding of agent architectures, retrieval systems, tool-calling, evaluation frameworks, and AI system reliability, with a demonstrated ability to use AI to improve engineering velocity and team effectiveness.
Authorization to work in the United States (Koala is not able to sponsor visas for this role).

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in healthcare, pharmacy, veterinary, or other regulated industries.
Experience in high-volume eCommerce, subscription businesses, logistics, or operations-heavy environments.
Experience with event-driven architectures, workflow orchestration systems, and asynchronous processing.
Experience leading platform engineering, infrastructure, or developer productivity initiatives.
Familiarity with AI evaluation, observability, governance, and operational best practices.

Why Join Koala

Why Join Koala

We believe AI is transforming both software development and business operations. We’re looking for an engineer who wants to help shape that transformation while remaining deeply hands-on. This role offers the opportunity to architect critical systems, influence engineering culture, establish AI-first development practices, and help build the technology foundation for the next stage of Koala’s growth.

If you're excited about combining strong engineering fundamentals, practical AI expertise, and meaningful business impact, we'd love to talk.

Perks

Meaningful mission helping modernize pet health
Remote-first culture built on flexibility and trust
Competitive base salary with performance-based incentives
Medical, dental, and vision insurance with partial dependent coverage
Generous PTO and a 401(k) plan
Supportive, close-knit team that celebrates wins and learns fast