Principal Engineer

Harbor Lab; Kentucky; Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days of paid annual leave

Private health insurance (family)

Hybrid or Remote work

Life Coach & Kick-Boxing Sessions

Lunch in office

Fitness center discount

Startup environment

Job summary

HarborLab is seeking a senior individual-contributor engineer who will own technical excellence across the platform, reporting to the CTO. You will guide microservices design, system reliability, and observability across teams, while not managing people.

You will bring 10+ years in software development, with hands-on leadership in a fast-growing maritime tech company, and a track record of improving CI/CD, monitoring, and AI-driven development. A hybrid/remote setup is available.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience, with 3+ years as the most senior technical voice in an engineering organisation.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and running microservices in a strongly typed backend language.
• Real experience with event-driven systems and relational databases at scale, incl. SQL and performance work.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on Kubernetes in a public cloud and managing infrastructure as code.
• Track record of measurably improving CI/CD, monitoring and release workflows, not just proposing improvements.
• Working knowledge of SLOs, error budgets and incident management.
• Daily use of AI tools in your own development work and ability to evaluate their outputs.
• Ability to balance pragmatic delivery with long-term technical soundness and explain trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap, debt reduction, reliability, pipelines, observability, and AI tooling with quarterly outcomes.
• Review the product roadmap quarterly, de-risk risky parts before build, and set standards in code/pipeline.
• Raise monitoring maturity, SLOs, incident response, and act as escalation for production.

Skills

Staff/Principal level

Microservices design

Kubernetes

CI/CD improvements

SLOs & incident mgmt

AI tooling

Cloud (AWS)

Relational databases

Tools

Java 17+

Spring Boot

RabbitMQ

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Terraform

Grafana

Job description

ABOUT HARBORLAB

Founded in 2020 in Greece, HarborLab is a fast-growing B2B maritime tech company on a mission to simplify and optimize port cost management. Our end-to-end,AI-powered SaaS platformtransforms how Shipowners and Shipmanagers handle Disbursement Accounts (DAs), bringing automation, real-time data, control and transparency to one of the most complex and costly parts of global shipping.

But we don’t stop there. HarborLab also powers a thrivingMarketplace, connecting Principals with a global network of vetted Port Agents and Vendors.

At HarborLab,people come first. Our culture is anchored in ambition, trustworthiness, genuine care, and agility—values we bring to every interaction with our customers and our team. We're proud to be consistently recognized as a Best Workplace (2021, 2022, 2023) and certified as a Great Place to Work (2024, 2025, 2026).

If you're looking to make a global impact, grow alongside passionate peers, and shape the future of maritime innovation—we’d love to meet you.

ABOUT THE ROLE

HarborLab builds the platform that shipping companies and port agents use to plan, approve and settle port calls, disbursement accounts, husbandry expenses, appointments, and the integrations that connect them to fleet management systems. Our product works, our customers depend on it daily, and our engineering teams ship a steady roadmap.

What we haven't done efficiently is invest in the platform underneath: paying down technical debt, modernising pipelines and observability, and adopting AI-assisted development seriously. We're fixing that structurally. Delivery and people management now sit with our three feature-team leads. This role owns technical excellence, and nothing else. It's a senior individual-contributor position with no direct reports, reporting directly to our CTO as its own engineering unit, alongside our three feature teams.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Own the technical roadmap, debt reduction, reliability, pipelines, observability, AI-assisted development, with quarterly outcomes, defended in the same forum as the product roadmap. This is hands-on: you write the code.
• Review the product roadmap each quarter, de-risk the technically risky parts before a team starts building, and set technical standards that live in the code and pipeline, not a wiki.
• Raise our monitoring, alerting, SLOs and incident response maturity, and act as the escalation tier for production.
• Take our early agentic workflows (Jira-triggered Claude Code, automated review) and make them reliable on a real codebase, and shape what AI tooling we adopt across engineering.
• Own the technical reality behind our security audits, and know where our performance and cost headroom is.
• Mentor our senior engineers, sit on every engineering hiring loop, and be the advocate for platform health.
• What you won't do: manage people, take on feature work to rescue a slipping sprint, or architect from a distance.

WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF YOU HAVE

• 10+ years of software development experience, including 3+ years at Staff/Principal level or as the most senior technical voice in an engineering organisation.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and running microservices in a strongly typed backend language.
• Real experience with event-driven systems and relational databases at scale, including SQL and performance work.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on Kubernetes in a public cloud and managing infrastructure as code.
• A track record of measurably improving CI/CD, monitoring and release workflows, not just proposing improvements.
• Working knowledge of SLOs, error budgets and incident management.
• Daily use of AI tools in your own development work, with a clear point of view on where they help, where they don't, and how you verify their output.
• The judgement to balance pragmatic delivery with long-term technical soundness, and the ability to explain the trade-off to non-engineers.

Additionally, the following will be considered a plus:

• Java 17+ and Spring Boot, our stack is Java 17 / Spring Boot 3.5+, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, JPA/Hibernate, Kubernetes on AWS, Terraform.
• Grafana / Prometheus and advanced observability practices.
• AWS cost optimisation at scale.
• Exposure to security audits and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001) or customer security due diligence.
• Once said yes to a management role, spent a year in calendar invites, and quietly missed the terminal. We understand. Welcome back.

WHAT WE OFFER

• 30 days of paid annual leave
• Comprehensive private health insurance coverage for your entire family
• Hybrid way of work (or Remote)
• Life Coach and Kick-Boxing Sessions
• Low-price, high quality lunch in the office
• Fitness Center discount close to the office
• Cool start-up environment

Equal Opportunity Statement

HarborLab is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Data Protection (GDPR)

HarborLab collects and processes personal data in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The information provided as part of your job application will be used solely for recruitment purposes. Your data may be retained in our talent database for future opportunities. You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time by contacting [e-mail].

Right to Work

By applying for this position, you confirm that you have the legal right to work in the European Union.
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