Principal Software Engineer

Panoptyc · Full-Time · Remote · Reports to CTO

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.

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.

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, it does not ship.

CI/CD and developer experience. Own the pipelines. Fast, reliable feedback loops that let engineers ship with confidence instead of anxiety. Integration, contract, and load test stages baked in — not bolted on later. If engineers are doing something manually more than twice, you automate it.

Cross-team technical leadership. Be a force multiplier for senior engineers on Core and SD — code reviews that teach, design discussions that sharpen thinking. Partner with our CV, HITL, Growth, and Loss Prevention teams on cross-cutting concerns and shared infrastructure patterns.

You have real .NET/C# backend depth — production systems, not CRUD apps that happen to compile. You know Angular well enough to be dangerous. You have built production apps in Nest.js and Next.js. Your AWS fluency goes beyond having touched S3 — you understand IAM, networking, compute tradeoffs, and what things cost at scale — and you are comfortable working across a mixed cloud environment that includes Heroku. You have debugged JWT token expiry at midnight, understand refresh flows, audience claims, and multi-tenant isolation in Auth0, and you can explain it to someone else without condescension.

Most importantly: you think in systems before you write code. You understand how pieces interact, where coupling creates fragility, and how to design for change. Your TDD practice catches actual bugs rather than passing by construction. Your CI/CD pipelines are something you would show as portfolio work, not YAML held together by hope.

Strong signals: experience in retail tech, loss prevention, or high-throughput event processing; background spanning both core infrastructure and client-facing delivery contexts; familiarity with Playwright BDD for cross-team end-to-end test alignment; SOC 2-aware development instincts.

Architects who do not code. Engineers who mistake framework familiarity for system design skill. Anyone who thinks PHP is having a renaissance. People who configure CI/CD by copy-pasting Stack Overflow and call it pipeline engineering. Resume-driven development.

Core runs on .NET/C# with Angular on the frontend. Service Delivery runs on Nest.js and Next.js. Each team owns their own unit testing approach; both teams align on end-to-end testing through Playwright BDD. We run on a mix of AWS and Heroku with Docker Compose locally. Authentication runs through Auth0 using JWTs. We are aiming at being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant this year.

Your architectural decisions will be visible in the product within weeks, not quarters. We are actively expanding into grocery, hardware, and apparel — new technical challenges are on the roadmap right now. Small team means real ownership and no committee-driven design-by-consensus. Competitive compensation, remote-first, async-friendly.