Principal Software Engineer, Platform

About the role

PermitFlow is redefining how America builds. We’re an applied AI company serving the nation’s builders, tackling one of the largest information challenges in the economy: understanding what can be built, where, and how. Our AI agent workforce helps the fastest-growing construction companies navigate everything from permitting and licensing to inspections and project closeouts – accelerating housing, clean-energy, and infrastructure development across the country.

Despite being a $1.6T industry, construction still suffers from massive delays, wasted capital, and lost opportunity. PermitFlow has already delivered unprecedented speed, accuracy, and visibility to over $20B in development, helping contractors reduce compliance time, de-risk projects, and scale with confidence.

As the U.S. enters a new capex supercycle across data centers, factories, housing, and renewables, joining PermitFlow means building the AI infrastructure at the core of every construction project driving the next wave of reindustrialization.

We’ve raised over $90M, most recently completing our Series B, from top-tier investors including Accel, Kleiner Perkins, Initialized, Y Combinator, Felicis, and Altos Ventures, with backing from leaders at OpenAI, Google, Procore, ServiceTitan, Zillow, PlanGrid, and Uber.

Our HQ is in New York City with a hybrid schedule (3 in-office days per week). We prefer NYC-based candidates or those open to relocation.

Role Overview

We’re hiring a Principal Engineer to own the evolution of our architecture and platform so it works for agents as well as people. Our goal is simple: double the output of our entire organization while raising the quality bar. The scope is the whole platform. You’ll work across infrastructure, shared services, and product code, and step in as a product engineer anywhere in the stack when that is the fastest way to move.

The ideal candidate is deep in code architecture and platform engineering, already works agent-first, and has built foundations that other teams adopted because they were better. This role reports directly to our VP of Engineering.

What You'll Do

Own the architecture of our codebase. Set the patterns, module boundaries, and domain abstractions across our monorepo, and lead the refactors and migrations that get us there.

Design the monorepo for agents. Structure packages, ownership, the build graph, and conventions so an agent can find the right context, make a scoped change, and verify it without reading the whole repo.

Build the platform substrate. Own the shared services, infrastructure, and paved paths (data access, background jobs, environments, observability) that product teams build on and agents can use safely.

Own the agentic SDLC. Define how work moves from ticket to production when agents do much of the writing, testing, and reviewing. Set the defaults every team builds on, and change them as models and tools improve.

Scale verification with volume. Build AI-assisted code review, test generation, and CI gates so confidence to merge keeps pace as PR volume doubles. Decide where human review is required and where it is not.

Put agents to work in the background. Stand up agents that pick up well-scoped tickets, triage flaky tests, run dependency upgrades and large migrations, and draft fixes from incidents and error reports.

What We're Looking For

You've owned the architecture of a large, multi-team codebase. You've set the module boundaries and patterns others build within, run monorepo tooling (Nx, Turborepo, Bazel, or similar), and led migrations that changed how a whole org works.

Strong platform and infrastructure depth: cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and services you've run in production through real incidents.

You can work across the stack as a product engineer, from data model to UI, and you're happy to do it.

You work agent-first today. A large share of the code you ship comes from AI coding agents, and you have specific, earned opinions on where they break and how codebase structure fixes that.

Current knowledge of the agentic stack as it applies to software engineering: context engineering, agent instructions and skills, MCP, sandboxed execution, and how to evaluate a coding agent's output.

You operate with earned authority. You influence through demonstrated judgment, working code, and clear writing rather than title or mandate.

15+ years of software engineering experience, including time setting technical direction across multiple teams.

What We Offer

Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth company

100% company-paid base medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees + healthcare FSA

401(k) savings plan

Unlimited PTO and paid family leave

Home office & equipment stipend

Daily in-office lunch and dinner provided

Commuter benefits (pre-tax transit and parking)

PermitFlow provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or family status, as protected by applicable law.

We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities. All employment decisions are based on merit, qualifications, and business needs.