Principal Engineer

Who We Are

Emergence is a thematic holding company backed by the Pritzker Organisation focused exclusively on acquiring and scaling category-defining software businesses. We combine operational rigour with a growth equity mindset, driving sustainable ARR growth, profitability improvements, and industry-leading customer outcomes across our portfolio.

The Mission

You're the technical backbone of Emergence's engineering team, the person who makes architectural calls, drives how the team works, and keeps quality and velocity high as we build AI-powered products across a growing B2B SaaS portfolio. You work directly with the Product leads on what gets built. You own how it gets built.

What You'll Do

• Own all architectural decisions across Node 20, Express, and TypeScript — accountable for production outcomes
  • Write and review production code regularly — estimated 40–60% of your time, with the remainder owning architectural oversight, resource allocation, and technical coordination across the stack
  • Define engineering standards across the team: code review gates, testing coverage, observability requirements, and incident post-mortems
  • Lead technical decisions on LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, MCP integrations, and AI cost management
  • Own the integration layer between the Node/TypeScript backend and Python automation layer, preventing cascading failures
  • Drive infrastructure maturity with the DevOps Engineer: IaC standards, observability baselines, AWS ECS Fargate migration
  • Own how the engineering team operates — allocate technical resources across workstreams, sequence priorities, remove blockers, and ensure the team is running at full technical capacity
  • Identify and resolve technical debt proactively through architecture reviews and refactoring sprints
  • Communicate architectural trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, translating constraints into business impact
  • Serve as the technical counterpart to Product leads — translate business direction into engineering decisions, surface risks early, and own the feedback loop on what is being built and how
  • Embed AI tools and smart tooling choices into how the team works, setting the standard for what high productivity looks like in a lean, high-output engineering team

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• 7+ years of software engineering, with a track record of owning both architectural decisions and the delivery machinery around them — not just writing code but making sure the right code gets written by the right people at the right time
• Deep Node.js and TypeScript in production — owned a backend, debugged performance issues, optimised queries
• Designed and shipped distributed systems: async queues, caching layers, pub-sub, background job orchestration
• Python engineering experience sufficient to review architectural decisions and own automation layer integration boundaries
• Acted as technical lead for a team of 5+ engineers — owned resource allocation, sequencing, and delivery quality without relying on a PM or EM to run the execution layer
• Owned a production incident end-to-end: detected, diagnosed, fixed, post-mortem, and prevention deployed
• Communicated architectural trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated track record of building high-output engineering culture in a lean team — using AI tools, smart tooling choices, and rigorous technical standards to punch above headcount

Nice-to-Haves

• Shipped LLM-powered features in production: prompt design, output validation, cost management
• RAG pipeline or agentic system experience in production
• MCP or A2A protocol experience
• AWS ECS Fargate, ECR, or equivalent container orchestration with IaC standards
• BullMQ, Redis, or Valkey queue management in production
• Neon Postgres or serverless database operations
• Grafana, Loki, or equivalent observability implementation
• PE-backed, multi-portfolio, or platform engineering context

Who You Are

You identify technical debt and architectural gaps in systems you don't own and submit proposals with effort estimates and business impact. You understand that your job is to make the team faster and better. You treat AI coding tools as infrastructure, not shortcuts — you embed them into how the team works and hold the bar high on what productive means for a lean, high-output engineering team. You reach for existing platforms before building custom solutions — and you can articulate clearly when building custom is the right call. You refuse to merge flawed code under deadline pressure and document the reasoning. You implement monitoring before shipping, not after incidents. You mentor systematically and leave inherited systems measurably better.

What We Offer

• Set the technical standard everything else is built on — own architecture end-to-end
• Work directly with Product leads and vertical owners as the technical counterpart to business direction
• 100% remote with flexible hours
• Competitive compensation based on experience
• Professional development budget for certifications and tooling
• High-ownership role across a scaling B2B SaaS portfolio