Principal Engineer

Freemodel; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 720,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

11 holidays

Unlimited PTO

Equity options

Healthcare benefits

401(k) plan with match

Laptop

Hybrid work environment

Job summary

A specialized home renovation service provider in the United States is seeking a principal engineer with backend expertise in Go to lead a product team. You will design AWS services and ensure system reliability while mentoring engineers. The ideal candidate will have strong cloud knowledge, leadership experience, and be proactive in using AI tools within development workflows. Benefits include unlimited PTO, healthcare, and equity options, with a salary range of $170,000 to $720,000.

Qualifications

• Strong experience building backend services in Go or similar languages.
• Practical experience with cloud deployment and AWS core services.
• Comfortable leading a small team with clear communication.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend stack and lead the design of backend services.
• Provide technical leadership to a small engineering team.
• Coordinate development across platforms ensuring smooth APIs.

Skills

Backend engineering depth

Cloud & AWS

Small-team leadership

AI-fluent

Communication & collaboration

Tools

AWS

Go

GraphQL

Terraform

Job description

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Qualifications

• 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 Have

• 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

Benefits

• 11 holidays
• Unlimited PTO
• Equity options
• Healthcare benefits
• 401(k) plan with match
• Laptop
• Hybrid work environment

Compensation

US total compensation includes base salary + equity. Range is determined by role and level. Base salary range is $170,000–$720,000. Equity and benefits are not included in the listed base.

Inclusion Statement

Freemodel deeply values diversity, equity, and inclusion. We believe strong perspectives strengthen our product and business. We’re committed to seeking the best talent from all walks of life.

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. We empower 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.