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
We're expanding platforms that support thousands of learners and teams worldwide:
- TimeBack: An educational platform enabling Alpha School's 2-hour learning approach (99th percentile test scores).
- Incept: A content generation platform producing personalized educational materials for various learning applications deployed at Alpha School.
- Crossover: An AI-driven hiring platform handling tens of thousands of monthly applicants, staffing educational institutions and enterprises globally.
You'll take ownership of one platform and dedicate the majority of your time to constructing the most intricate portions of the codebase with a compact team (3-5 senior engineers, no junior members). The architectural choices you make will dictate whether other teams can build new applications quickly, integrate seamlessly, and deliver value to learners. Correct decisions unlock extraordinary leverage. Poor choices lead to integration chaos and paralyze velocity across numerous teams.
You design, build, and operate your systems. You define quality standards and technical patterns for your platform. We follow a spec-driven approach: you design before implementing, always plan before building. High autonomy, no committees, no approval boards. Compact, cohesive team where you own what you deliver.
What you will be doing
- Technical Leadership: Define strategic architectural choices and set technical patterns for the team to adopt.
- AI Leadership: Champion new AI-driven workflows and develop high-value playbooks.
- Implementation: Construct the complex, critical components of the codebase working directly with your team.
- Quality Reviews: Verify that your team adheres to established patterns and upholds quality benchmarks.
What you will NOT be doing
- Acting as an architect without writing code
- Spending time in continuous meetings
- Managing personnel (this is a technical leadership position, not a people management role)
- Handling legacy maintenance or internal IT infrastructure
Candidate requirements
- A minimum of 5 years of professional software development experience creating software products
- A minimum of 3 years serving as either a lead engineer (conducting code reviews) or architect (driving key technical decisions)
- Background working on platform-level products where other teams integrated with your APIs
- Active engagement with AI tools, consistently experimenting and exploring new capabilities
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
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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.
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