Principal Engineer $200,000 USD/year Pay is set based on global value, not the local market.
Most roles = hourly rate x 40 hrs x 50 weeks
Description
You'll take ownership of one of the platforms thousands of students and teams rely on daily:
- TimeBack: The educational platform behind Alpha School's 2-hour learning model (99th percentile test results).
- Incept: A content generation platform producing all personalized educational content for multiple learning applications deployed at Alpha School.
- Crossover: An AI-powered hiring platform that processes tens of thousands of applicants monthly, staffing schools and companies around the world.
Your primary focus will be building the most complex components of the codebase with a small team of 3-5 strong engineers (no juniors). The architectural choices you make will determine how quickly other teams can build new applications, integrate seamlessly, and deliver value to students. Correct decisions unlock massive leverage. Poor ones generate integration bottlenecks and erode velocity across multiple teams.
You design, build, and operate the systems you create. You set quality standards and establish patterns for your platform. Our approach is spec-driven: design precedes implementation, planning comes before building. You'll have high autonomy—no committees, no review boards. You'll work in a small, cohesive team where accountability for what you ship is yours.
What you will be doing
- Technical Leadership: Drive strategic architectural decisions and define technical patterns the team will follow.
- AI Leadership: Champion the adoption of emerging AI workflows and develop high-impact playbooks.
- Implementation: Construct the complex, high-stakes portions of the codebase working directly with your team.
- Quality Reviews: Verify that your team adheres to established patterns and upholds quality standards.
What you will NOT be doing
- Designing architectures without writing code
- Spending time in endless meeting cycles
- Managing people (this is technical leadership, not a people management position)
- Maintaining legacy systems or handling internal IT infrastructure
Candidate requirements
- A minimum of 5 years of professional software development experience building software products
- A minimum of 3 years in a role as either a lead engineer (reviewing others' work) or architect (making key technical decisions)
- Proven experience working on platform-level products where your APIs were consumed by other teams
- Active and deep engagement with AI tools, consistently experimenting and exploring new boundaries
Meet the hiring manager
Applying for a role? Here’s what to expect.
Crossover's skill assessment process combines innovative AI power with decades of human research, to take the guesswork, human bias, and pointless filters out of recruiting high-performing teams.
Chat-style
screening interview.
Cognitive 
aptitude test.
Prove real-world 
job skills.
Interview with the hiring manager.
Accept Job Offer.
Pass 
proctored test.
Frequently asked questions
About the role
Reviews
Meet some people who've landed similar jobs
Recruitment sucks. So we’re fixing it.
The Olympics of work
It’s super hard to qualify—extreme quality standards ensure every single team member is at the top of their game.
Premium pay for premium talent
Over 50% of new hires double or triple their previous pay. Why? Because that’s what the best person in the world is worth.
Shortlist by skills, not bias
We don’t care where you went to school, what color your hair is, or whether we can pronounce your name. Just prove you’ve got the skills.
Join the world's largest community of 
AI-first remote workers.