The Opportunity
Cordova is seeking a visionary, AI-native Principal Engineer who masters the balance between architectural strategy and hands-on execution. This isn't a role for a planner who has stepped away from the keyboard; it is for an engineer whose strategic instincts are sharpened by staying "in the work."
At this level, you aren't just following a roadmap—you are helping to draw it. You are the person the team turns to when the stakes are high and the path forward is ambiguous. You are expected to be fully AI-native, utilizing agents and AI tooling as your primary means of exploring, designing, and building. You bring structure to chaos and move the team forward with conviction and technical excellence.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & AI Governance
Hands-on Ownership: Take direct accountability for the most complex code and critical technical work. You lead from the IDE, not just the whiteboard.
AI-Native Operations: Set the standard for how AI agents and tools are used and governed across the division. You lead through practice, demonstrating how AI enhances exploration, debugging, and architecture.
Future-Proofing: Contribute to the long-term direction of the platform, specifically focusing on serverless architecture, event-driven systems, and deep AI integration.
Solution Design & Strategy
Architectural Excellence: Lead solution design for cross-cutting systems, ensuring every decision reflects a balance of technical purity and commercial reality.
Proactive Problem Solving: Identify "expensive" technical hurdles before they manifest, driving the alignment needed to resolve them with efficiency.
Business Connectivity: Frame technical strategy in terms of business outcomes, ensuring technology serves as a direct driver of company goals.
Mentorship & Influence
Organic Development: Elevate the engineers around you through the quality of your presence in design conversations, code reviews, and direct collaboration.
Clarity Building: Move projects forward without waiting for consensus; build clarity through action and bring the team along with you.
The Ideal Candidate
Technical Environment & Stack
Modern Stack: Proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js and React.
AWS Cloud: Deep experience with Serverless and Event-Driven patterns (Lambda, RDS, SQS/SNS, S3, API Gateway, EventBridge).
AI Tooling: Mastery of AI agents and development tools as a core part of the daily workflow.
Who You Are
Judgment Over Checklists: You have spent enough time in the stack to know that judgment—knowing which problems matter and how to frame them—is the most important skill.
Critical AI Criticality: You hold an uncompromising bar for the code you ship, critically evaluating AI-generated output with the same rigor as your own.
Bias for Action: You don't wait for permission or perfect information. You find the problems and build the path forward.
Fundamental Depth: Whether your experience is in this specific stack or another, you have the deep engineering fundamentals to translate your skills into any environment.