Principal Engineer
Full-Time Position | Portland, Oregon
About Us
Rapta is revolutionizing precision US manufacturing with an agentic native AI Platform trusted by the nation's top defense primes. Backed by top investors and growing 521% year-over-year, we're a Portland-based team building computer vision and robotics technology that keeps America's most critical production lines running flawlessly. If you want to do meaningful work at the intersection of AI and advanced manufacturing, we'd love to meet you.
Position Overview
We're seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical anchor of Rapta's engineering organization. You will write production code every day, own architecture decisions, and lead by example alongside a small team of senior engineers — reporting directly to the CTO.
This role is intentionally two-phased. Phase one: you are the strongest IC on the team and you prove it through output. Phase two: as Rapta scales, this role converts to Director of Engineering — your IC credibility becomes the foundation of your leadership. Compensation is benchmarked at the Director level from day one.
If you want to stop coding and manage people, this isn't the right fit. If you lead through craft and high standards, it is.
What You'll Do
- Own architecture and development of production-grade distributed computer vision systems on the edge in accessible and fully isolated environments.
- Lead technical design reviews, establish engineering standards, and mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers
- Drive research initiatives and experimental design to advance our AI inference and servicing systems
- Build scalable data pipelines for model training, validation, and delivery
- Collaborate directly with the CTO on platform roadmap and technical due diligence
What We're Looking For
- 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a principal, staff, or lead architect role
- Deep curiosity for distributed systems, applied AI, and industrial software challenges
- Expert-level Python, Golang and software architecture skills
- Strong technical communication — you can write a protobuf schema in the morning and explain system tradeoffs to an investor in the afternoon
- Proven team leadership — you raise the technical ceiling of every team you join
Required Technical Skills
- Expertise in prompt engineering and AI-assisted development as a daily practice — Claude Code, Augment, Copilot, or equivalent is a force multiplier in your workflow, not a novelty
- Deep experience with gRPC / Protocol Buffers — schema design, versioning, streaming, service contracts
- Expertise in building scalable distributed ML training and inference pipelines
- Strong hands-on experience with Go (Golang) for tooling or service implementation
- Proficiency with Bazel or comparable monorepo build systems (Buck, Pants)
- Experience with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar deep learning frameworks
- Infrastructure-as-code fluency: Ansible, Terraform, Docker (including NVIDIA runtime)
- Proficiency with version control, CI/CD practices, and cloud infrastructure
Highly Competitive Candidates Will Also Bring
- Previous experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, or quality control systems — massive plus
- Understanding of industrial cameras, sensors, and imaging hardware (Basler, GenICam, or similar)
- Knowledge of manufacturing quality standards (ISO, Six Sigma)
- Experience with edge computing and on-premises deployments in constrained or air-gapped environments
- Exposure to DOD, defense industrial base, or CMMC compliance requirements
- Zero-trust networking experience (Tailscale, WireGuard, mTLS)
- Computer vision library experience (OpenCV, scikit-image)
Why Join Us?
- Work with cutting-edge AI technology in a high-impact industry
- Meaningful early-stage equity — this is a foundational role at a late seed-stage company
- Competitive compensation and benefits package
- Professional development and learning opportunities
- Opportunity to shape manufacturing technology that impacts American industry
Location Requirements
This position requires full time, 5 days per week in-office presence at our Portland headquarters. Candidates local to the Portland, Oregon metro area or willing to relocate will be strongly preferred and considered highly competitive. Remote-only applicants will not be considered for this role.
Equal Opportunity
Rapta is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, making decisions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected class.
How to Apply
No recruiters or agencies — we only accept applications directly from applicants.
Top Skills
What We Do
Rapta is an AI software company that helps companies improve profitability, quality of manufactured product and accelerate training of manufacturing staff. Our AI Supercoach provides inline QA for manufacturing line workers & robotic processes and catches quality issues as they happen. Human operators are trained in real time by our AI software and video-based work instructions, up-skilling them on your assembly processes while ensuring quality of the work being completed. Our tools provide supervisors with task level analytics to help determine bottlenecks, eliminate human errors and ultimately, improve and optimize production workflows. The AI Supercoach can be deployed in less than a day and ensures high quality of every part manufactured protecting your brand and ISO/Quality certification. Learn more: https://rapta.ai
