Principal Engineer (AI-First) →

DTU — Technical University of Denmark; Aarhus; Hybrid; DKK 1,000,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity potential

Direct access to founders

Job summary

Aleta is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the platform's technical direction for a financially focused wealth platform. You will own architecture, data models and the calculation engine, ensuring correctness and driving AI-powered engineering practices.

Work closely with the two founders and a small team to ship high-quality, scalable software with minimal bureaucracy. Based in Aarhus, you will influence both product and engineering decisions and help shape the platform's future.

Qualifications

• AI is your primary engineering method.
• You own architecture and data model decisions.
• Interest in financial data / fintech familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture, data model and technical direction.
• Own the calculation engine (Rust) and where correctness matters most.
• Drive monitoring, troubleshooting and root-cause analysis across the pipeline.
• Enforce and evolve engineering conventions and agent workflows.
• Guide the engineering team through technical decisions and hiring.

Skills

AI proficiency

Architecture leadership

Debugging expertise

Fintech interest

Tools

Rust

TypeScript

Next.js

PostgreSQL

Neon

Job description

Own the engineering direction of a modern wealth platform, built AI-first from the ground up and trusted by family offices around the world with more than USD 100 billion in assets.

On behalf of our client Aleta, we are looking for a technically strong Principal Engineer who already uses AI as the primary engineering method.

Aleta is a wealth intelligence platform for family offices. The company is headquartered in New York with offices in Denmark and Bangkok. They consolidate data across banks, custodians, asset classes and entity structures, and turn it into reporting that owners use. They have an established business with strong revenue growth.

About the platform

The platform has recently been rebuilt from the ground up with TypeScript and Next.js on the application layer, a Rust calculation engine, Postgres on Neon, fully serverless. No legacy systems to work around — a modern codebase without ten years of debt attached.

The platform is also live, with more than USD 100 billion in assets on it. Nightly calculations, ingestion from banks, reports that must be right every single morning.

Your role

You are the Principal Engineer responsible for the platform’s technical direction and the technical lead of a deliberately small team. You set direction, own the standards, and decide what is good enough. No people management responsibilities — Aleta management handle that.

What AI-First means here, concretely: agents do the volume work. Every task is a written goal with an explicit definition of done. The rules aren’t aspirational; they’re files in the repo that every session runs under. Correctness is non-negotiable: money is decimal-exact, and ported behaviour is verified against fixtures from real output.

Your role is to make sure AI accelerates engineering without compromising correctness. You review what they produce, you reject what doesn’t meet the bar, and you own the decisions that must never be wrong.

You’ll work directly with the two founders, who know this domain deeply and build the product themselves. Product decisions happen in conversation, not through layers.

What you’ll do

• Own architecture, the data model and technical direction
• Own the calculation engine — Rust, and where correctness matters most
• Drive monitoring, troubleshooting and root cause analysis across the whole chain — file into numbers out
• Enforce and evolve their engineering conventions and agent workflow
• Guide the engineering team through technical decisions and help choose who are hired around you

Who are you?

We care more about what you’ve learned and what you’ve owned than the number of years on your CV.

What matters is that you can point to evidence: things you built because you couldn’t leave them alone, responsibility you earned faster than your peers, code you’d defend in a room full of strangers.

• AI is already your primary engineering method, and you have opinions about where it fails
• You naturally debug from symptoms to root cause. Logs, traces, metrics and database state are where you start—not where you end
• Judgement over dogma. Uncompromising on the numbers, pragmatic about everything else. You know what must be perfect and what must ship, and you don’t gold-plate
• Interest in financial data. Fintech experience is a plus, not a requirement
• Based in or near Aarhus. This role sits with the people who hold the domain knowledge

More about how they work at Aleta

‘AI-first isn’t a slogan here’

It’s how the whole company runs. Every task is a written goal with an explicit definition of done, and the rules are files in the repo, not aspirations.

‘Deliberately small’

A few exceptional people with real ownership, rather than a large team with diluted responsibility.

‘Direct and honest’

At Aleta, they argue about the work, openly and without politics — including with the founders.

What Aleta offers

In this position,

• Competitive salary depending on experience, with the potential for equity
• You own the engineering direction for a modern platform serving significant wealth
• Zero people administration
• A direct line to the founders. Short decisions, no committees

Moreover, you’ll have direct access to the people making product and technical decisions, and you’ll see the impact of your work immediately. With a small team comes real ownership, short feedback loops, and the opportunity to influence both the platform and how engineering is done.