Founding Principal Engineer (Full Stack)

About AZX

Our mission is to accelerate positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation.

We’re growing quickly and already work with category-leaders in real estate (CBRE), energy (LevelTen Energy), logistics (Flexe) and utilities (can’t say which large utility yet).

We’re a public benefit corporation, founded in 2024 and have been profitable from the beginning (bootstrapped with consulting).

We work on challenges in clean energy, decarbonization, climate risk, energy systems and global economics. We’re building our company for long term success and aim to build the ultimate place to work if you’re passionate about AI and positive impact.

About the Role

We seek an experienced Principal engineer to bring sharp problem-solving instincts and a passion for establishing engineering excellence while tackling complex, high-impact challenges.

You’ll be one of the first full time engineers, work closely with company founders and will have an enormous impact.

You will help foster a culture of engineering and product excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement as we grow the company.

Some of our client projects are enterprise-style and some are fast innovation cycles. Over time, we’ll be investing more in our own platform to accelerate client value.

You'll join a company founded by experienced, successful veterans in climate and AI. The team brings exceptional expertise from Microsoft, AI2, ARM, acquired startups, and even a major utility, including PhDs, published ML researchers, and former industry executives.

What you will do

You will work on software projects in client engagements, and over time, internal platform capabilities.

You will:

• Lead, architect and implement solutions to often ambiguous client problems

• Establish and lead engineering standards and patterns that scale across clients and the company

• Mentor and develop engineers as we scale

• Lead cross-functional collaboration

• Design and write clean, scalable code at appropriate quality standards (sometimes “right”, and sometimes “right now”).

• Create, integrate and productize AI capabilities (analytical models, GenAI, digital twins…).

• Stay current with emerging technologies, experiment with promising tools and share evaluation insights

• Collaborate across disciplines

Core Qualifications - Technical and foundational

• Able to independently and efficiently build features in TypeScript/React and backend APIs (Python/FastAPI or Express/Deno)

• 10+ years of experience with demonstrated technical leadership experience

• Experience establishing and evolving engineering best practices and architectural standards

• Passion for leading, mentoring, and building technical teams

• Strong communication and problem-solving skills in often ambiguous situations

• Experience with cloud native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• Proficiency in full-stack fundamentals

  • E.g., Front/back-end tech, databases, debugging, tests, SDLC, Git

  • Core engineering concepts (e.g., concurrency, memoization, caching, etc)

• Able to use AI dev tools maturely

• Degree in CompSci, related field, or equivalent experience

Values and Culture Qualifications

• High emotional intelligence and a learning mindset

• Strong collaboration skills

• Enjoy others' success and a fun, positive environment.

• Comfortable making decisions in the face of ambiguity and course correcting as needed.

Bonus Qualifications (not required but a huge plus)

• Experience in both startup and enterprise environments

• Past work in energy, real estate, utilities, climate or related fields

• Active contributor to the technical community (conference talks, open source contributions, technical publications, blog posts).

• Bonus if you have experience and passion in one or more of

  • Additional web frameworks (e.g. Svelte, Vue, Angular)

  • Lower-level languages e.g. C++, Rust

  • Networking paradigms e.g. GraphQL, Websockets

  • ML capabilities e.g. Sk-learn, xgboost, Pytorch/Tensorflow/JAX, Onnx…

  • Additional database types such as graph or vector databases

  • DevOps e.g. CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi and/or Bicep

  • Generative AI e.g. prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, tooling ecosystem

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive early-stage startup compensation (based on capabilities, experience, and location)

• Bonus eligibility

• Health insurance with meaningful coverage for dependents

• Flexible paid time off

• Equity

• Fully remote culture with a cluster of teammates in Seattle

• Training and learning opportunities

• Be part of a fast-growing, profitable, mission-driven company with industry leading clients tackling the massive opportunity of AI transformation in critical industries

Logistics

• Remote but only USA/Canada

• Must be willing to travel to Seattle area for final interview and travel 2x/year for company summits

• Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

• We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.

Next steps

If this job sounds great, we’d love to hear from you. If you feel aligned to the company but don’t check all these boxes, we’d still love to hear from you!