Principal Software Engineer

About the Role

Kurtosys builds the platform that asset and wealth managers use to produce and distribute client-facing reports, marketing materials, and data-driven documents at scale. We're a regulated fintech -- ISO-27001 certified, operating across four global offices, fully hosted on AWS. The engineering team is small, senior, and moving fast.

This role sits in Product Engineering. You'll own features end-to-end: from understanding the business problem, through architecture and implementation, to deployment and production monitoring. The work spans front-end (React, TypeScript), back-end services (Node.js, serverless), databases (PostgreSQL, SingleStore), and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Cloudflare). You'll work across all of it -- not because we expect you to be an expert in everything on day one, but because we expect you to be capable of working wherever the problem takes you.

What makes this role different from the other senior engineering listings you'll see this week: AI is not a line item on our roadmap. It's how we work. The engineering team uses AI daily -- for architecture, implementation, code review, testing, and delivery. We have AI agents embedded in our workflows, shared prompting standards across the codebase, and an expectation that every engineer uses these tools to move faster and think more clearly.

We're not looking for someone who is "willing to embrace AI." We're looking for someone who already has, and who can show us something we haven't tried yet.

What You'll Actually Do

- Solve business problems, not just technical ones. You'll work with product managers and designers to understand what clients need, then figure out the right way to build it. The best engineers here challenge requirements, not just implement them.

- Own features from architecture to production. You'll design APIs, model data, build UIs, write tests, deploy, and monitor. You won't hand things off to another team -- you'll see them through.

- Ship with AI as your primary tool. You'll use AI coding tools to prototype, iterate, and deliver at a pace that wouldn't be possible without them. You'll also know when AI is wrong and have the judgement to catch it.

- Improve how we work, not just what we build. We value engineers who bring ideas about process, tooling, and standards. If you've found a better way to do something, we expect you to advocate for it.

- Work in a regulated environment. Our clients are in financial services. That means accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.2 AA), security best practices, data isolation, and audit trails are not optional. You'll need to build with these constraints as defaults, not afterthoughts.

What We're Looking For

Judgement and problem-solving ability. You can break down an ambiguous problem, identify what matters, make a decision, and explain why. You don't wait to be told what to build -- you figure it out and propose a path.

An embedded AI workflow. You don't just "use Copilot sometimes." You have a workflow -- prompting patterns, tool configurations, an understanding of where AI helps and where it hallucinates. You can describe a specific task you completed with AI this month, what went wrong, and how you fixed it.

Specificity over generality. When we ask about your experience, you name the system, the client, the decision, and the trade-off. You don't describe what a good engineer would do in theory -- you tell us what you actually did.

Communication that influences. You can explain a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder. You can write a proposal that gets buy-in. You can disagree with a colleague constructively. In a remote-heavy, async team, this matters as much as code quality.

Full-stack capability. You're comfortable in React and TypeScript on the front end, Node.js on the back end, SQL at the data layer, and AWS for infrastructure. You don't need to be an expert in all of it, but you need to be able to work across all of it without waiting for someone else.

Ownership and reliability. You finish what you start. You test your own code. You monitor what you deploy. You don't consider a feature done when the PR is merged -- you consider it done when it's working in production and the client is using it.

What Will Set You Apart

- You've built or contributed to something with AI that changed how your team works -- not just used it for autocomplete.

- You have opinions about software architecture and can defend them with trade-offs, not dogma.

- You've worked in a regulated or compliance-heavy environment and understand why constraints exist.

- You've shipped a side project, contributed to open source, or written about engineering publicly.

- You bring experience or genuine curiosity in the financial services or investment management domain.

Tech Stack

You'll work across these technologies. Experience with all of them is not required -- being able to learn quickly with AI assistance is.

- Frontend: React, TypeScript

- Backend: Node.js, TypeScript, Serverless (AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers)

- Data: PostgreSQL (Aurora), SingleStore, RDS MySQL

- Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, SQS), Cloudflare (CDN, Workers), Docker

How We Work

- Hybrid from our Cape Town office (Claremont). Flexible hours.

- Small, senior team. You'll work directly with the CTO and senior engineers -- not through layers of management.

- AI-first engineering. AI tools are part of our daily workflow. We share prompting standards, maintain AI agent configurations across our codebase, and expect every engineer to use these tools to multiply their output.

- Agile without the theatre. We plan, build, ship, and learn. We don't do ceremony for the sake of process.

Benefits

Hybrid working with flexible hours

Generous leave policy

Employee wellbeing programme

Access to learning platforms

Regular team events

Working with a global team across four offices

Kurtosys is committed to transformation and inclusive hiring. In line with our Employment Equity plan, preference will be given to suitably qualified candidates from designated groups.

Get in touch to learn more!