Principal Product Engineer - Real-Time AI Creative Tools

Makers Fund; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Significant equity

Health benefits

Monthly stipends

Company retreats

Collaborative office culture

Job summary

Pika is seeking a Principal Product Engineer in Palo Alto to lead the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for user-facing systems. In this senior leadership role, you’ll guide the engineering direction for features serving millions of creators—from intuitive UIs and collaboration tools to real-time interactions and advanced generative AI experiences.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to deliver robust, scalable experiences, influencing both user

Qualifications

• 8+ years in professional software engineering.
• Led design, execution, and scaling of high-impact web or mobile products.
• Strong systems design across distributed services and cloud infra.
• Experience with ML/AI workflows and AI tooling.
• Excellent communication and leadership across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own and define architecture and technical strategy for Pika's web and multi-platform products
• Spearhead real-time collaboration, messaging, and live multi-user interactions
• Drive product features from ideation through scoping, development, launch, and iteration
• Integrate complex generative AI workflows into creative tooling
• Partner with product and design leaders to deliver accessible creative workflows
• Mentor engineers and uphold high architectural standards
• Oversee cross-service metrics, tracing, and observability for critical features

Skills

Senior engineering experience

Web/mobile product leadership

React/TypeScript

Node.js/Go

System design & cloud infra

ML/AI infrastructure

Tools

React

TypeScript

Node.js

Go

Python

AWS

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Postgres

Redis

Job description

Pika is seeking a Principal Product Engineer in Palo Alto to lead the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for user-facing systems. In this senior leadership role, you’ll guide the engineering direction for features serving millions of creators—from intuitive UIs and collaboration tools to real-time interactions and advanced generative AI experiences.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to deliver robust, scalable experiences, influencing both user