Principal Software Engineer (Retail/Partner)

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Partner engineering team, the group that builds and operates the software powering our relationships with retail partners. This is a senior IC role. You will not manage people directly, but you will lead through technical direction, architecture decisions, and cross-functional partnership.

This role is specifically intended for engineers with meaningful grocery, retail, or retail technology experience. Our systems operate within complex enterprise retail environments, and success in this role requires an understanding of retail operations, integrations, store workflows, inventory and pricing systems, and partner constraints.

You are a builder at heart. You are energized by hard problems in the retail and grocery space, comfortable working directly with enterprise partners and internal stakeholders, and know that the best solutions are often the simplest. You think in systems, write production code regularly, and take pride in shipping software that works reliably at scale.

Who You Are

You care deeply about the problem we are solving. Reducing food waste and making groceries more accessible is meaningful work, and you bring a high level of ownership and craftsmanship to everything you build.

You are collaborative, thoughtful, and pragmatic. You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and helping teams move forward. You raise the technical bar around you through strong engineering judgment, clear communication, and mentorship.

You are equally comfortable discussing architecture with engineers, operational workflows with retail partners, and tradeoffs with product and business leaders.

What You Will Do

Own and build partner-facing systems

• Design, build, and operate the core backend services and integrations that power Flashfood's partner platform, from data ingestion pipelines to partner-facing products.
• Ship high-impact features end to end: backend services in Node.js, TypeScript, and where the role calls for it, React-based frontends for partner-facing tooling.
• Take full ownership of the systems you build, including reliability, observability, on-call response, and ongoing improvements.

Drive architecture and technical quality

• Lead architecture discussions for new and evolving systems: APIs, data models, service boundaries, and integration patterns with external retail systems.
• Identify technical debt and complexity that slows the team down, and lead initiatives to address it.
• Set the standard for TypeScript usage, testing, API design, and observability across the pod.

Work closely with partners and internal teams

• Engage directly with enterprise account managers and retail partners to understand their technical environments, integration constraints, and operational needs.
• Translate partner requirements into scalable, maintainable engineering solutions.
• Partner with Product, Data, and Business leadership to shape the technical roadmap and surface engineering risks early.

Lead through influence, not authority

• Mentor engineers on the team through code reviews, pairing, and architectural guidance.
• Help define engineering norms and best practices across the org, not just the pod.
• Raise hard questions early, advocate for the right tradeoffs, and bring people along with you.

What You’ll Bring

Must-Haves

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with recent, hands-on work in backend or full-stack development.
• Deep expertise in TypeScript and JavaScript, writing clean, maintainable, type-safe code across both frontend and backend.
• Extensive Node.js experience building and operating production services at scale.
• Experience building enterprise or B2B software, including integrations with external systems, partner APIs, or data pipelines common in retail environments.
• Direct experience working for or with traditional grocery or retail companies. You understand how these organizations operate, what their tech stacks look like, and what it means to build software that fits into that world.
• Strong data instincts. You instrument your systems well, know how to measure impact, and make decisions based on evidence.
• Comfortable being customer-facing. You can communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders and build trust with partners.
• Solid cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containers, and modern deployment practices.
• Practical knowledge of CI/CD, automated testing, and observability.
• Experience designing robust data models and working with relational and NoSQL databases at scale.

Nice to Have

• React and Next.js experience for building partner-facing UIs or internal tooling.
• Experience with AI-assisted development and agentic workflows: configuring and managing LLM agents, working with agent harnesses, or building systems that incorporate agentic components.
• Familiarity with tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar AI-powered developer tooling. Bonus if you have opinions on when these tools help and when they do not.
• Experience integrating LLM-based capabilities into production software: prompt management, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation, or multi-step agent pipelines.
• Familiarity with event streaming (Kafka), job orchestration (Airflow, Temporal), or GraphQL.
• Prior experience defining technical strategy at an organizational level or leading large cross-team initiatives.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits
• 100% remote work with flexibility and trust
• Mission-driven work that reduces food waste and expands access to affordable food
• A fast-growing, collaborative team with big ambitions
• Real opportunities for career growth and expanded responsibility