Principal Software Engineer

About the role

About Us

Lorikeet is redefining what customer support looks like — and we're just getting started.

We build AI that handles complex, high-volume support for fintechs, healthtechs, marketplaces, and delivery services. Not chatbot-tier AI. The kind that actually resolves tickets, gives support teams their time back, and raises the bar for what software can do.

We're backed by over $50M USD from QED, Blackbird, and Square Peg, with backing from operators like Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-Stripe COO) and Cristina Cordova (Linear COO), plus founders of Canva, Atlassian, and Airwallex. We're the first company since Canva to be funded at early stage by all three of Australia's top VC funds — which tells you something about the calibre of people who've looked closely at what we're building and said yes.

Our customers include some of the largest telehealth, fintech, and marketplace companies in the US and Australia — many handling over a million support tickets a year. The problems are real, the scale is real, and the work matters.

If you want to build something that genuinely changes how businesses and customers interact — this is the place.

About the role

We're hiring a Principal Engineer for our New York office, which opened this summer. You'll work alongside our other principals to set technical direction for the company.

We're defining what AI-first product development looks like in practice: the UI/UX, the capabilities, the data models, and the systems underneath them. It's a wide open problem space, and you'll be one of the people deciding which problems matter most and how we solve them.

In practice, that means you'll:

Set technical direction. Own the architecture for major parts of our product and make the calls that shape the platform for years to come — then write the code to back them up.

Take on our hardest problems. The ambiguous, high-stakes, cross-cutting work: reliability at millions-of-tickets scale, evaluation and quality systems for AI agents, and the foundations other engineers build on.

Define how we build with AI. Coding agents are a core part of our workflow. You'll design the tooling, guardrails, and feedback loops that make them effective across the team — and bring the judgment to know when output is ready to ship and when it isn't.

This is a hands-on role. You'll spend most of your time building, and you'll lead through the quality of your thinking and your work rather than through a reporting line.

Our stack is TypeScript, React/Remix, PrismaORM, NestJS, and some Python. Knowledge of the stack is nice; we know great engineers pick things up fast.

We'd love to talk if you

Have 10+ years of experience shipping software, including time as a staff- or principal-level engineer at a company with high engineering standards

Have set the technical direction for a product or platform and lived with the consequences — you can tell us what you'd do differently

Have led ambiguous, high-stakes projects from blank page to production, across the stack

Make other engineers better through design reviews, mentorship, and the example you set in your own code

Use coding agents as a core part of how you build — not just as autocomplete, but as a real development workflow — and have opinions on how teams should use them

Want to be early: real scope, real ownership, and real upside at a fast-moving company

What's unique about this opportunity?

A culture that's genuinely different. Low ego, high trust, no tolerance for talented jerks. We work efficiently, keep hours flexible, and actually mean it — because life outside work matters. We're committed to building a diverse team and actively encourage applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. We care far more about user obsession and eagerness to learn than traditional credentials.

A front-row seat to building something meaningful. We're Series A and moving fast. You'll have real scope to shape the product and the company — not just execute someone else's vision.

Performance recognized in real time, not on a calendar. Promotions happen when you're ready — leadership meets every six weeks specifically to identify and recognize strong performers, so you're never waiting for an arbitrary review window to move up.

We're AI-native, and we'll make you AI-native too. Every person at Lorikeet uses AI in their day-to-day work (current favourite: Claude Code), with unrestricted access and no usage limits. You'll leave with skills that matter for the next decade of work.

Twice a year, the whole company flies to Hawaii. Headquartered in Sydney, with teams spanning the US and UK — which means getting everyone in the same place is something we invest in seriously. We spend the time hacking on ideas, building things together that wouldn't otherwise exist, and making memories that remind you why you joined a startup in the first place.

A recruitment process built on respect, not hoops. We keep it simple: a couple of informal chats to share our story and hear yours, followed by a paid ~two-day work trial. The work trial is genuinely the best part — you'll work on real problems alongside the actual team, get a true feel for how we operate, and we'll both come out of it knowing whether this is the right fit. No trick questions, no take-homes that disappear into a void. Just real work, done together.

If you're from an underrepresented background and don't tick every box, please reach out anyway. We know firsthand that diverse teams perform better, and we're proud that our team reflects a broad spectrum of identities and lived experiences.