Principal Engineer

Remote candidates within UTC -8 to -3 timezones (PT to BRT) are welcome to apply.

At Metalab, we design pretty exciting products, but the building is where you come in. Our technology team needs your help in concepting new ideas with technology and bringing our products across the finish line for our clients to enjoy in the wild. To thrive in this role, you’ll provide technical support and guidance on projects, tackle new skills, and show up ready for anything.  You collaborate with our design and product teams to find relatable, new ways to use technology, helping others work within technical limits, and building products that improve people’s lives. Your team is important to you, and you take pride in helping build and guide junior and intermediate developers grow into leaders.

We believe the magic happens when you combine thoughtful collaboration, strong processes, and the freedom for people to be themselves. When you’re comfortable being yourself, you do your best work and inspire others to do the same.

Sound like you? Read on.

Responsibilities

• Collaborates with our talented design and product teams to ideate, concept, and develop new products 

• Leads and guides technical teams on either the front or back end (ideally both) including technical architecture. 

• Lead the integration and fine tuning of pre-trained ML models and AI services into products and guide other developers to do it.

• Use ML frameworks to implement pre-built and custom algorithms to power smart products and data driven features.

• Provides a strong point-of-view on various technologies and tech ecosystems

• Builds prototypes and technical proof of concepts early with design to help clients envision their future product experience

• Delivers complex features without being given much detail, design, or specification 

• Provides feedback on designs for completeness, implementation effort and feasibility

• Reviews project team members' code submissions to match the needs of the project (in terms of quality, correctness, consistency, performance, etc)

• Participates in shares with the client stakeholders on project progress

• Is a trusted advisor to client design, product and engineering teams, helping them surmount obstacles and deliver amazing products 

• Supports department by sharing technical knowledge you learn with other project teams

• Identifies when your project team members are stuck on a technical challenge and offer support

• Continually looks for ways to improve workflows within projects for themselves and other developers

The must-have shortlist

• 7+ years of Full Stack experience, in an agency setting is a bonus

• Appreciation of design and can protect its complexity without compromising fidelity

• Responds positively and is able to help the team adapt to changing priorities within projects

• Organized, self-motivated, and comfortable advocating for yourself and the work  

• You can communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences and are comfortable leading presentations of work frequently

• You can design and communicate strong technical solutions that our internal and client teams understand and want to work on and understand how to achieve compromise on business trade-offs and technical decisions

• You have experience building full-stack applications across both the frontend and service layer using modern Typescript frameworks (ie. React, React Native, Nest)

• You have experience creating both REST and GraphQL APIs that enable client applications to persist, process, and retrieve data from various types of databases (ie. PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB)

• You have experience using ML models and AI services to power real-live products (ie. Google Cloud AI, Azure AI, AWS AI or Bedrock, GPT, Dialogflow, Claude, LangChain),

• You have experience implementing ML algorithms with common frameworks in end-to-end applications (ie. TensorFlow, Synaptic, ML5.js, Spark ML).

• You’re adaptable and quick to embrace unexpected changes in direction

• You appreciate design and are able to protect its integrity without compromising fidelity or feasibility

• You’re motivated by feedback and by the opportunity to improve in your role, in the work, and in how you work together as a team