Principal Backend Engineer

📋 Description

• • Hauler Hero is a dynamic and rapidly growing waste management SaaS platform, dedicated to modernizing the industry through innovative technology. We empower haulers and waste management companies with solutions that streamline operations, from intelligent route optimization to efficient billing and comprehensive customer management. Having achieved significant product-market fit, we are now poised for substantial scaling to accommodate our expanding customer base and ambitious growth trajectory. This is an exceptional opportunity for a seasoned Principal Backend Engineer to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our platform.
• • As a Principal Backend Engineer at Hauler Hero, you will be instrumental in scaling a robust and proven production system through its next critical growth phase. This is a hands-on technical leadership position where you will inherit a well-established platform and be entrusted with the responsibility of identifying and rectifying performance bottlenecks, enhancing system efficiency, evolving our architectural landscape, and ensuring our backend and data systems can reliably scale to meet the demands of a rapidly growing business. You will collaborate closely with the Head of Engineering and existing principal engineers, contributing significantly to the strategic technical direction of the company.
• • A significant portion of your time will be dedicated to writing and deploying production-ready code, directly impacting the performance and scalability of our core services. We foster an AI-First Engineering environment, where AI tools are deeply integrated into our daily development workflows. In this principal role, you will leverage AI for code implementation while retaining ownership of architecture, design, and the establishment of technical standards. A key aspect of your contribution will be to rigorously validate all AI-generated solutions, ensuring their correctness, scalability, and robustness against edge cases. Furthermore, you will act as a mentor to the team, guiding them on the effective and critical use of AI tools, promoting best practices, and fostering a culture of thoughtful innovation.
• • We are actively seeking engineers who are enthusiastic about AI-assisted development and possess the vision to establish best practices within this evolving paradigm. You should be a strong technical leader who understands that the speed offered by AI does not equate to a compromise in quality or standards. We are looking for Principal Engineers who can confidently guide the team through this technological transition, embracing new tools while upholding engineering excellence. This role is not suited for engineers who are resistant to AI-assisted development or unwilling to integrate it into their daily work, nor for those who blindly accept AI output without thorough validation and critical assessment.
• • Principal-Level Expectations: You will bring a proven track record of scaling real-world production systems through significant growth phases. You will have a deep understanding of PostgreSQL performance and scaling challenges, with a history of successfully addressing them. Other engineers will naturally seek your architectural guidance and mentorship. You will have a history of making impactful, long-term architectural decisions that have had company-wide implications. You will possess the ability to clearly articulate the trade-offs between various valid technical approaches. You will have demonstrated experience in mentoring senior engineers and demonstrably elevating the overall capability of engineering teams. Your contribution will be characterized by deep expertise, not merely familiarity, in your core technologies.
• • What You'll Do: Your responsibilities will include scaling backend services and PostgreSQL to support continued business growth. You will be tasked with identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks across the entire technology stack. You will design and evolve data models to accommodate new features and increasing data loads. You will lead critical architectural decisions that will shape the long-term trajectory of the platform. You will establish essential engineering patterns and best practices to ensure consistency and quality. You will write and ship production code primarily in Java and Kotlin, leveraging the Spring Boot framework. You will own features end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and on-call support. You will actively mentor and elevate the skills and capabilities of other engineers on the team.
• • Our Tech Stack includes: Backend technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, and PostgreSQL. Cloud infrastructure primarily on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with AWS as an acceptable alternative. Caching solutions including Redis and Firestore. Frontend development utilizing React. Mobile development with Native Android. This diverse and modern tech stack provides a rich environment for innovation and problem-solving.