Principal Software Engineer

Rockstar is recruiting for a New York City–based pre-Series A startup building advanced AI sales and support agents for the real estate industry. They are a team dedicated to creating a reliable, scalable foundation that supports rapid growth, drives customer adoption, and accelerates the long-term success of their AI agents.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction and lead the development of the core platform spanning real-time communication, automation, and large-scale AI-driven workflows. You'll architect and deliver high-impact systems, guide engineering best practices, and collaborate closely with product, AI, and go-to-market teams to ensure the technology consistently delivers measurable value. Your work will shape a reliable, scalable foundation that supports rapid growth, drives customer adoption, and accelerates the long-term success of the AI agents.

Responsibilities

This role entails playing a critical role in the development of the AI-powered lead and customer management product.

- Own and lead the design, development, and deployment of major product features across the AI-driven lead management stack.

- Make key technical decisions on architecture, infrastructure, and scaling.

- Drive rapid iteration and experimentation: ship fast, learn fast, and iterate.

- Collaborate directly with founders to shape product direction and technical strategy.

- Debug and solve problems across the stack, no "not my job" mentality.

- Set the engineering bar: code quality, testing, reviews, and best practices.

- Build and manage strong working relationships with technical counterparts. Mentor and share knowledge with peers, creating a positive atmosphere amongst the team.

- Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback while quickly actioning feedback from code reviews conducted of your code.

- Influence decision-making through presentation of data-centric business topics.

Minimum Qualifications

- 9+ years experience as a software engineer building and shipping production quality code

- Experience with open source languages such as Python and TypeScript

- Experience with writing and shipping reliable, scalable, and efficient code, with an emphasis on long-term maintainability, in partnership with all appropriate reviewers, in manageable pieces with relevant documentation and test plans

- Experience with software design and architecture

- Experience with AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code

- Role is flexible/hybrid

- Fluency in English is required

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience writing code in Python

- Experience writing code in React.js

- Experience with AWS technologies

- Client/partner-facing and/or experience communicating to an audience

- Experience working in highly collaborative environments

- Experience working on multi-person code bases including open source or personal projects

- Experience contributing to developer and platform documentation

What We Offer

- Competitive salary with equity options

- Medical, Dental and Vision premiums covered at 100%

- Snacks, a generous tech budget, unlimited vacation, and company outings