Original job description
About Stackpoint
Stackpoint is a venture studio that conceives, builds, launches, and scales AI-native companies in high-barrier verticals like real estate, construction, hospitality and financial services. Led by co-founders who have both built unicorn real estate tech companies from scratch, we're a tight team of engineers, product managers, designers, and operators with decades of experience building products, teams, and businesses from startup to scale.
We focus all of our energy on discovering and solving customer and business problems, designing financially strong and defensible business models, activating growth engines, hiring world-class founding teams, and helping them thrive (and none of our energy on big-company b.s.). Our dedicated capital, experienced team, proven process, and deep strategic network supercharge founders and accelerate growth. We're based in Boston but have a distributed team, work remotely and come together every quarter for in-person team building.
We're building a pooled, Studio-wide engineering team - and we're looking for principal-level engineers who want to build across an entire portfolio of companies, not just one.
The Role
> Context - How the Studio operates: We launch one new company per quarter. For each, we embed a pod - a dedicated PM, Designer, and one or more Studio Engineers - for ~6 months alongside a founding CEO we recruit and back. The first three months focus on discovery: identifying the wedge product, assessing technical feasibility, and accumulating design partners. The second three months shift to building the wedge while hiring the company's founding technical team (Head of Engineering, sometimes 1-2 IC engineers or contractors) in parallel. Because launches are staggered quarterly, at any given time the Studio is hands-on in ~2 companies at different stages. Shared resources across Marketing, Sales, Finance, Ops, and Recruiting flex across companies during the first 6-12 months based on what's needed to hit key milestones.
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As a Principal Engineer, you are the person who builds. You'll typically embed with a single portfolio company for several months at a time - architecting, coding, and shipping backend systems and responsive frontends from prototype through MVP launch. As that company graduates to its own engineering team, you'll roll onto the next build, bringing compounding experience across domains and tech stacks. You'll partner directly with PMs, designers, and founding CEOs to turn discovery insights into functional software.
This is a hands-on, full-stack IC role. You'll report to the Studio's Head of Engineering and you'll be expected to own entire product surfaces end-to-end: cloud infrastructure, APIs, data pipelines, UIs, and deployment - often on the same product. Technology choices are problem-driven, not preference-driven, and you articulate tradeoffs clearly.
AI-native development is core to how you work. You use tools like Cursor and Claude Code daily, you've integrated LLMs into production systems, and you have hands-on experience with prompt engineering, structured outputs, and cost/performance tradeoffs. You follow the AI landscape actively and make pragmatic adoption decisions.
What You'll Do
Full-Stack Product Development
Architect, build, and ship backend systems and responsive frontends for new products across our portfolio, from prototype through MVP launch.
Infrastructure and DevOps
Set up and manage deployment environments, CI/CD pipelines, logging, and monitoring for new builds using modern cloud or hosted tools. Make pragmatic decisions that prioritize speed and reliability in early-stage systems.
AI-Native Development
Leverage AI coding assistants as core workflow tools to accelerate building, iteration, and experimentation. Integrate LLM-powered features into customer-facing systems where they create real value - including agentic workflows, structured outputs, retrieval patterns, API integration, and evaluation of model tradeoffs.
Deep Engagement, Then Rotation
Embed with a portfolio company for the duration of its Studio-led build (typically ~6 months). Own the technical execution alongside the pod. When the company transitions to its own team, roll onto the next build with fresh context and compounding experience.
Product Collaboration
Partner with PMs, designers, and founding CEOs to translate discovery insights into functional software. Contribute to feasibility assessments and help teams understand what's buildable, what's risky, and what's worth a "build to learn" bet.
Technical Transition Support
Help portfolio companies hire their own engineering teams (Head of Engineering, senior ICs) and execute clean handoffs of Studio-built systems within ~6 months of launch.
Studio Tooling and R&D
Contribute to internal tools and reusable frameworks that create compounding leverage across the Studio's portfolio companies.
What We're Looking For
Experience and Background
5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful exposure to modern product/engineering cultures and varied company stages
Building in early-stage 0→1 environments (seed to Series A), operating in high-ambiguity settings and contributing from concept through launch
Comfortable with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and the chaos of pre-product-market-fit development
What You Bring (The Essentials)
Agentic AI: Experience building AI-driven workflows in production (orchestration, tool-use, multi-step reasoning). You know how to make LLM-powered systems reliable in real-world B2B contexts - not just prototypes (structured outputs, retrieval patterns, prompt design, and model tradeoffs).
Data Pipelines: Experience ingesting unstructured or messy data sources (PDFs, documents, web scrapes, APIs) into vector stores (embeddings) and databases (Wide column stores, SQL/NoSQL) for downstream AI queries (semantic search).
0→1 Building: You’ve taken products from “blank page” to production launch - not just features within established products. You’ve built and shipped from concept through launch and early iteration in early-stage or startup environments. You architect for the long term, but optimize for rapid learning and execution in the early build phase.
Full-Stack Ownership: You are proficient in the modern stack (Python/Node + NextJS/React/Vue.js) and can take a build from local development to production deployment using modern cloud or hosted infrastructure.
Secure Architecture Principles: Understanding of software and AI attack surfaces, secure coding, and handling of PII or sensitive data in regulated industries.
AI tooling fluency: Actively uses AI-powered development tools to accelerate daily work and engineering workflows. Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape.
Bonus Points if You Have...
Experience with Multimodal AI in production systems (image/video/voice understanding and/or generation)
Prior venture studio, agency, or consulting experience where you've ramped fast into new domains and shipped quickly
Working Style
Context-switching is a feature, not a bug. You find variety energizing and ramp fast into new domains, codebases, and team contexts
Speed and pragmatism define your output. You understand the difference between "build to learn" and "build to scale" and make that call explicitly
You operate on the frontlines of product work. You’re a strong cross-functional collaborator engaging with customers, PMs, designers, and stakeholders in early discovery cycles (onsites, interviews, feedback loops), and using those signals to shape technical and product decisions - not just execute requirements
You're user-led in your thinking but bold enough to advocate for technical bets when you see an opportunity
You're driven by craft and impact, not title or territory. You care about quality but aren't precious - you'll throw away a prototype without flinching if the team learns something important
You're low-ego, generous with knowledge, and someone other engineers want to work with
Why This Role Is Different
Breadth over depth: You'll touch more industries, domains, and technical challenges in a year than most engineers see in five. Real estate, insurance, construction, finance - each portfolio company is a new problem space.
Build, not maintain: Every engagement is a greenfield build. You're always working on the hardest, most interesting phase of a product's life - the 0→1.
A real team, not a solo act: You'll work alongside a small, high-caliber engineering team - plus PMs, designers, and operators - who are collaborative, low-ego, and deeply experienced at building from scratch. This isn't a lone-wolf contractor gig; it's a tight team that learns and compounds together.
Leverage over repetition: Your Studio tooling and R&D contributions don't just serve one product - they accelerate every future company Stackpoint creates.
Direct impact: You'll work directly with founders, the full Stackpoint Studio team, and portfolio company customers. No layers. No politics. Just building.
Logistics
Compensation: Competitive base, comprehensive health benefits + equity participation in every company we launch during your time here.
Location: Flexible within U.S. and Canada - we operate remotely.
Reports to: Studio Head of Engineering.
