Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer — Core & Service Delivery Panoptyc · Full-Time · Remote · Reports to CTO About Panoptyc Panoptyc builds AI-powered loss prevention for the real world — micromarkets, corporate dining, grocery, and beyond. Our platform combines computer vision, human-in-the-loop review workflows, and deep retail integrations to help operators detect theft, reduce shrink, and protect margins at scale. We run on a mix of AWS and Heroku and build on proprietary computer vision AI. Small team, high ownership. Everyone here moves the needle. The Role We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to be the technical anchor for our Core and Service Delivery teams. You are not a manager — you are the engineer who makes the whole system make sense. You will own architectural decisions, raise the quality bar on testing and CI/CD, and be the person others turn to when something is genuinely hard. Core owns the foundational platform: customer-facing SaaS features, data models, and the infrastructure everything else depends on. Service Delivery owns the operational layer — integrating Computer Vision solutions for use by our internal Loss Prevention team of HITL investigators. You will be the connective tissue between both. What You will Own Architecture and systems design. Drive architectural decisions across both teams — API design, service boundaries, data flow, and scalability patterns that hold up as we enter new verticals. Lead design reviews and be the final word on approaches that will be costly to undo. Design auth and identity flows that are secure and maintainable: JWT, Auth0, token lifecycle, multi-tenant patterns. Test automation and quality. Own TDD culture across both teams — not just evangelizing it, but writing the hard tests that prove it is achievable. Design automated test strategies for complex scenarios: async pipelines, third-party integrations, multi-tenant edge cases, video processing workflows. If it does not have meaningful test coverage,