Principal Engineer

Why This Role Matters:

Vouchs engineering organization is becoming agent-native: a large and growing share of our production code is written by AI coding agents working inside human-governed guardrails. That moves the hard problems. Writing code got cheap; deciding what to build keeping the architecture coherent and proving that what shipped is correct did not. This role owns that layer.

This is a principal-level individual contributor seat reporting directly to the CTO with a mandate that spans our estate: a harness for agent-built software your first ownership deliverable production AI doing judgment-heavy insurance work a backend whose bounded contexts need to become real and the cloud platform underneath all of it.

We are not going to lay the whole system out in a posting we would rather keep the details as our edge until you are across the table from us. The short version: we extracted the machinery that let a small team ship roughly 1100 governed changes in seven weeks at a sub-1% change-failure rate and we are generalizing it into a platform leaving open technical questions are the kind this role would actually want to be responsible for answering.

What Youll Do:

• Own the platform that governs agent-built software. A harness where markdown specifications compile to a traceability lock deterministic gates decide done every agent action leaves tamper-evident evidence and a calibrated multi-vendor panel of LLM reviewers blocks what humans should not have to catch. You will take it from working extraction to adopted platform: scope its next milestone build its plugin surface operate and score the review seats and prove it generalizes beyond the repository it was born in.
• Make bounded contexts real across our backend. Our backend estate asserts one service one bounded context; a handful of services actually implement ports and adapters; the rest is your brownfield. You will turn design-doc DDD into enforced architecture context maps anti-corruption layers boundary checks that run in CI without freezing a team that ships daily.
• Ship agentic systems that do real insurance work. Durable multi-week agent workflows with human approval gates tool contracts and capability boundaries planner/executor orchestration extended in production in front of the experts whose judgment they encode.
• Make model behavior measurable and autonomy earned. Eval suites as merge gates golden datasets LLM tracing and token/cost observability calibration of LLM reviewers against ground truth. Autonomy expands when the evidence says so and you own the evidence.
• Run platform and delivery engineering at organization scale. An AWS multi-account estate in Terraform behind GitOps; two orchestrators in production; CI/CD pipelines that are generated not hand-written; ephemeral environments per pull request. You will make the paved road faster than the shortcut.
• Be the CTOs architecture thought partner and raise the bar. Strategic-design working sessions ADRs with teeth review comments that catch what tests cannot; specifications written to be read by humans and coding agents alike mutation-testing bars adversarial review. When we argue about where a boundary belongs you are the other half of the argument.

About You:

A principal engineer here is equal parts AI engineer DevOps engineer and software architect. We mean that literally and we will interview for all three.

You are a software architect.

• You have shipped domain-driven design not just read about it: a bounded-context map you drew and then enforced an anti-corruption layer that saved a migration a hexagonal refactor that survived contact with a deadline and you know when the pattern is overkill.
• You are at home in more than one language ecosystem e.g. systems-level work in Rust or a peer language large-scale strictly-typed TypeScript etc. and you know which discipline each one demands.

You are an AI engineer.

• You have built and operated agent systems in front of real users tool contracts capability boundaries approval gates and the machinery that makes them trustworthy: eval gates provenance capture autonomy expanded through earned evidence rather than optimism.
• Frontier models are daily instruments in how you build and the model can probably do this is a hypothesis you test with an eval not a hope you ship on.

You are a DevOps engineer.

• You have run infrastructure other people depend on: infrastructure-as-code at organization scale GitOps container orchestration secrets observability-as-code and a pager you did not hand back.
• You treat delivery machinery CI/CD environments releases as a product with users and you can argue a migration in cost and risk rather than tool preference.

Across all three.

• You reason in writing. ADRs design docs review comments decisions here live in documents and you make arguments better by writing them down.
• You multiply rather than add. The measure of this seat is what the engineers and agents around you can safely do a quarter after you arrive.
• You have experience in and passion for early-stage startups and/or high-growth environments

Nice To Have:

• Typescript Python and/or Rust in production
• A shipped record of brownfield modernization strangler migrations context extraction boundary enforcement in CI
• Durable-execution engines and event-driven systems with schema governance
• Eval frameworks LLM observability and MCP
• A background in insurance or other regulated categories

Vouch provides several benefits to help you bring your best self to work:

• Competitive compensation and equity packages
• Health dental and vision insurance
• Parental leave
• Flexible vacation time
• Wellness allowance
• Technology allowance
• Company-sponsored personal and professional development
• L&D: Partnerships with Ethena and monthly Lunch & Learns
• Wellbeing: access to many wellbeing perks including Peloton Fetch OneMedical Headspace care etc.
• Caregiver Support: company seed into the dependent care FSA and company sponsored membership.
• Regular performance reviews: Vouch conducts regular performance discussions with all team members offering goal setting and check-ins development discussions and promotion opportunities.

What to expect in a typical interview process:

(Please note these steps may vary slightly depending on the role)

• 30-minute phone call with our recruiting team
• 30-45 minute video interview with the hiring manager
• Case study/technical screen
• Meet the team! 30-45 min 1:1 video discussion with 3-4 team members youd work closely with in the role
• Executive chat
  
  

Compensation philosophy:

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry and are part of our total compensation package which also includes benefits and other perks. We also include stock options in all compensation packages and believe all Vouch employees should have the opportunity to become owners in the company. Individual pay decisions are based on a number of factors including qualifications for the role experience level skill set location and business need. The pay range provided is subject to change and may be modified in the future.

Vouch believes in putting our people first and building a diverse team is at the front of everything we do. We welcome people from different backgrounds experiences perspectives and ranges of abilities. We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate the diversity of our growing team.

If you require reasonable accommodation to complete this application interview complete any pre-employment testing or otherwise participate in the employee selection process please direct your inquiries to.

Required Experience:

Staff IC