Principal Engineer, Architecture

Moon; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Moon is seeking a senior IC to own platform architecture and drive performance, uptime, and security. You will operate directly with the VP of Engineering, shaping the technical standards used across the organization and delivering resilient systems for a rapidly growing home-improvement SaaS solution.

You will tackle the toughest problems, design for scale, and mentor engineers to raise the bar. This role demands deep distributed systems and a track record of shipping under tight deadlines, all

Qualifications

• 12+ years of engineering with staff/principal scope at high-growth startups.
• Demonstrated ability to scale systems across multiple company stages.
• Proven expertise in distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and security.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the platform and cross-team components for performance, uptime, and security.
• Tackle the hardest problems and tight deadlines as an individual contributor.
• Understand the product mechanics in detail and prevent failures.
• Mentor the engineering team through code/design reviews and pairing.
• Own engineering health with processes and guardrails that keep quality high.
• Ship continuously with reference implementations and robust guardrails.
• Simplify complex pieces that scale when needed and retire suboptimal ones.

Skills

Senior-level engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Data modeling

API design

Security

Mentorship

Job description

Moon is an ambitious, independent vertical SaaS company incubated by Home Organizers, a market leader with decades of proven success in home organization through its subsidiaries, including Closet World, Closets by Design, and Brio Water Technology. Born inside one of the industry's largest operators — 6,000+ employees, hundreds of thousands of new customers served annually — Moon is built on a rare advantage: we build for the home improvement industry from within it.

Our mission is to reinvent the home improvement experience end to end. From AI-driven marketing and in-home 3D design to sales, service, and operations, Moon unifies the entire customer and business journey on a single platform — supercharged by Luna, our proprietary AI engine. Where most operators stitch together disconnected tools that don't understand the homeowner, we're building the unified operating system the industry has never had. We're a rapidly growing team of committed builders, driven to reimagine how this industry sells, designs, and delivers — and to power the next generation of operators, from single-location dealers to national franchise networks.

Role Overview

You will be the most senior individual contributor in Moon's engineering organization, with company-wide technical authority, working directly with the VP of Engineering. You will own the toughest problems and the toughest deadlines personally, understand the mechanics of the application in complete detail, and design it for maximized performance, uptime, and security. With the VP of Engineering you will own the overall health of engineering - not by managing people, but by owning the processes, systems, and standards that make every team better. You ship continuously, and you set the standard for what excellent engineering looks like in this organization.

About the role

• You will join at the moment the foundational architecture decisions get made - the ones the next five years are built on. You have done this before at a high-growth startup that scaled through multiple stages quickly, and you personally laid foundations that survived every stage.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of the platform and everything that crosses team boundaries - designed for performance, uptime, and security as first principles.
• Take the hardest problems and the tightest deadlines yourself, as an IC, and deliver them.
• Know the application's mechanics in detail: every critical path, every seam, every failure mode.
• Mentor the engineering team to greatness: code review, design review, pairing, and example - you are the standard others calibrate against.
• Own engineering health with the VP of Engineering - the processes and systems, not the people management - that keep quality, velocity, and reliability high.
• Ship continuously: reference implementations, the hardest seams, and the automated guardrails that protect the platform.
• Make simple things that scale when they need to - and kill elegant things that don't ship.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of engineering with staff/principal scope at high-growth startups; personally scaled systems through multiple company stages.
• The signal we screen hardest for: practicality. Come ready to tell us about the infinitely-scalable design you rejected in favor of the simple thing that shipped - with specifics.
• Deep distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and security expertise.
• A record of mentorship that engineers volunteer unprompted.
• Writes clearly enough that contracts and design docs replace meetings.

The pay range for this role is:

320,000 - 380,000 USD per year (Moon HQ)