Staff/Principal Software Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 18, 2026.
About the Role:
We are hiring Staff and Principal Engineers to take full, hands-on ownership of Blitzy's most critical production-grade systems and to deliver high-leverage features that materially improve customer outcomes and engineering velocity.
This is the most senior individual contributor role at the company today.
This is not a Senior-plus role, an architecture-only role, or a promotion-track role. We are looking for someone who has already operated at Principal / Staff+ scope in a highly technical environment and expects to spend their time writing, reviewing, and shipping production code.
This role is 100% hands-on. Leverage comes from system ownership, execution quality, and durable technical decisions - not people management or process.
Responsibilities:
- Own mission-critical production systems end-to-end, ensuring correctness, scalability, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Design, build, and ship high-impact backend systems and features that improve product reliability, performance, and customer value.
- Architect scalable services and cloud infrastructure using technologies such as Python, REST, gRPC, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
- Identify and resolve complex technical bottlenecks that limit engineering quality, system performance, or organizational velocity.
- Build and operate LLM-powered systems and validation loops that evaluate correctness, consistency, durability, and production performance.
- Design and evolve data architectures incorporating relational, NoSQL, graph, and vector databases to support complex enterprise applications and semantic retrieval.
- Modernize and improve complex enterprise systems while balancing reliability, maintainability, scalability, and delivery speed.
- Set and uphold engineering quality standards through hands-on technical leadership, sound technical judgment, and ownership of long-term technical decisions.
Qualifications:
- Direct experience with Python as a primary programming language, backend frameworks, and microservices architectures.
- Expertise in REST and gRPC, with proficiency in Node.js and JavaScript.
- Proficiency in GCP, along with experience using at least one additional cloud platform such as AWS or Azure.
- Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes and Terraform in production environments.
- Experience operating highly available production systems, including monitoring, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, and operational tooling.
- Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, or DynamoDB.
- Familiarity with graph databases such as Neo4j and vector databases or embedding infrastructure for semantic search and retrieval.
- Hands-on experience building and operating LLM-powered systems in production, including evaluation, validation, regression testing, tracing, and failure analysis.
- Working knowledge of LangSmith or comparable LLM observability and evaluation tools; familiarity with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar model providers is a plus.
- Ability to contribute across the full stack, with a strong understanding of frontend architecture and the ability to debug, design, and ship across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI systems.
- Understanding of large-scale enterprise software systems, including architecture, integration, deployment, modernization, and long-term maintainability.
- Proven track record of operating at Staff+, Principal Engineer, or equivalent level, independently driving complex technical initiatives and delivering high-impact outcomes with minimal supervision.
Our Culture:
Who we are:
Led by two pioneering co-founders we are one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., creating our own category of enterprise autonomous software development. We automate thousands of hours of software development for our customers, which includes strong representation within the Fortune 500.
How we work:
- We move Blitzy Fast: Time is both our company's and our clients' most precious asset. We move quickly and decisively to innovate internally and deliver exceptional software externally.
- Championship Mindset: We operate like a professional sports team. We win as a team by holding ourselves and each other to high standards, collaborating in-person, and remaining focused on the mission.
- Passion for Invention: We're pushing the frontier of what's possible, requiring constant innovation and iteration.
- We Work for the Customer: We focus on delivering outsized value to the customers.
Blitzy is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We believe different perspectives make us stronger.
Skills
Python, Generative AI, Neo4j, Node.js, Backend Architecture, System Design, Microservices Architecture, SQL, Graph DBMS