Principal Engineer

Beam AI builds self-learning AI agents and an operating system where intelligence grows through autonomous discovery. We transform enterprises from AI-curious to AI-native organizations with automation that delivers results today and learns to improve itself over time.

Join us in shaping a future where AI continuously discovers, adapts, and makes work more meaningful.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to lead one of our squads while remaining hands-on in the code.

You’ll take ownership of a product area, work with Product to turn an unclear problem into something the team can build, and guide it through release and beyond. You’ll make important technical decisions, take on difficult work yourself, and help the engineers around you grow into greater ownership.

The work includes building AI agents that customers can rely on. That means caring about how they behave in production, learning from what goes wrong, and improving both the product and the way the team builds it.

What You’ll Do

• Lead a team of engineers and own the delivery and quality of your product area.
• Design and build across the stack, taking on the technical problems where your judgment matters most.
• Work with Product to shape solutions, make trade-offs and ship useful work.
• Build and improve AI-agent capabilities that operate reliably in real customer workflows.
• Set a strong bar for testing, evaluation, observability and production ownership.
• Coach engineers through code reviews, feedback and day-to-day decisions.
• Use AI coding tools in your own work and help the team use them effectively.

Requirements

• 8+ years building software, including experience leading engineers as a tech lead or manager.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills. You still write code and enjoy solving difficult technical problems.
• Experience building across backend services, APIs, databases and user-facing products.
• Experience shipping LLM or agent features to customers and improving them based on production behavior.
• Sound judgment about architecture, reliability and when a simpler solution is enough.
• Experience helping engineers grow and taking responsibility for a team’s output.
• Practical use of AI coding tools, with a clear sense of where they help and where human judgment matters.

You don’t need to have worked with every part of our stack. Experience with TypeScript/Node.js, React/Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, event-driven systems or cloud infrastructure is useful, but equivalent experience transfers.

How We Work

We keep teams small and give them meaningful ownership. You’ll have room to make decisions, direct access to the people shaping the product, and responsibility for what happens after your work ships.

We move quickly, but we care about building things that hold up. We use AI in our daily work, stay close to customer problems, and expect people to be direct with each other when something needs to change.

If you like leading engineers without stepping away from engineering, we’d like to hear from you.

Benefits

At Beam, we're building an environment where ambitious people can do their best work, with clarity, purpose, and room to grow. We're thoughtful about what we build, how we work, and who we hire. The problems we're solving are real. The systems we're building are complex. And the people here care deeply-about craft, about speed, and about doing work that actually matters.

We offer competitive compensation and benefits, equity, flexible working arrangements, work-from-anywhere, parental leave, and the opportunity to grow with a team that values high standards, meaningful work, and learning by doing.

You won't find rigid hierarchies or endless process here. You'll find high trust, high standards, and a team driven by curiosity, ownership, and long-term thinking.

What you can expect from us

Our culture is shaped by our values in action:

• We think in agentic workflows, uses AI tools daily, and looks for leverage through automation.
• We ship fast, learn faster, and favour experimentation over perfection.
• We invest in high-impact work and value ownership.
• We align on outcomes while giving people autonomy.
• We seek clarity, welcome feedback, and continuously improve.

If this is the kind of work you want to do and the kind of team you want to build with, we'd love to hear from you.

Using AI in the Application Process: We encourage candidates to use AI thoughtfully throughout the application process. AI can support research and preparation, but we want to understand your own thinking, experience, and perspective.

If this is the kind of work you want to do and the kind of team you want to build with, we'd love to hear from you.