The Principal Engineer at WISEcode serves as a technical leader, defining architecture and strategy while mentoring teams and ensuring scalable designs in personalized nutrition products.
At WISEcode, we're a well-funded, dynamic startup. WISEcode makes personalized nutrition a reality based on the facts – what truly is in our food — and marries this data with your preferences. Powered by AI and the world’s best food and nutrition database, WISEcode embraces the fact that we are all different, have different dietary needs, objectives, and preferences, and should not be at the mercy of market spin or “expert” opinion. Every one of us should have the information we need to make the best decisions for ourselves.
About the Role
WISEcode Principal Engineers (PEs) are the company’s highest-impact individual contributors - technical leaders who not only write exceptional code but also define the architecture, technical vision, and long-term direction for multiple teams or entire parts of the platform. They are recognized not just for their technical depth, but for their ability to connect the dots across products, data systems, and business goals. A Principal Engineer at WISEcode operates as both a strategist and a practitioner - translating abstract ideas and company missions into scalable technical designs that stand the test of time. They typically lead by influence rather than authority, inspiring alignment and excellence across teams without formal managerial control. As bar raisers of engineering culture, they mentor other engineers, enforce standards of operational excellence, and drive innovation across WISEcode’s growing ecosystem of data, AI, and consumer products.
A hallmark of WISEcode Principal Engineers is their T-shaped skill set: deep expertise in three or more technical domains (the vertical of the “T”) combined with broad understanding across adjacent systems, disciplines, and business contexts (the horizontal). This breadth allows them to identify dependencies and opportunities that others may overlook - connecting data infrastructure, application logic, and consumer experience into a cohesive strategy. They can dive deep into debugging distributed data pipelines or optimizing Postgres and Lakehouse schemas, yet also comfortably navigate discussions about product metrics, user experience, or cost-performance trade-offs. This versatility enables them to function as connective tissue across teams and disciplines, guiding decisions that align engineering execution with the company’s mission.
Where other engineers might focus primarily on execution or a single feature, WISEcode Principal Engineers are expected to bridge the gap between strategy and tactical implementation. They think in systems and long-term architectures, ensuring that today’s design choices do not compromise tomorrow’s scalability or flexibility. Yet, they are also pragmatic - they know when to prioritize speed over perfection and how to align short-term deliverables with strategic imperatives. Their work frequently shapes organizational technical roadmaps and helps leadership make sound investment decisions about data models, AI infrastructure, and product evolution. Through influence and thought leadership, they elevate the technical bar across teams, helping others execute with the same level of rigor and clarity.
Another distinguishing trait is their product and business acumen. Principal Engineers at WISEcode are not passive recipients of product requirements - they actively help shape them. Because of their understanding of data, user needs, and system capabilities, they can anticipate what’s possible before it’s formally defined. This gives them a degree of standalone product savviness uncommon among engineers. They can often fill in for missing product clarity, drafting the “first version” of a product spec through technical framing, and iterating with product managers to refine scope and priorities. They balance consumer obsession with engineering realism, ensuring that solutions delight users while remaining feasible and sustainable.
In essence, WISEcode’s Principal Engineers embody technical mastery, systems thinking, and product sense at scale. They are storytellers and architects who inspire confidence through clarity of thought, executional precision, and the ability to turn strategic ambiguity into tactical momentum. They don’t just build systems - they build the frameworks and cultures that enable the entire organization to innovate faster, operate more reliably, and make better decisions grounded in long-term thinking about data, technology, and the future of personalized nutrition. By leading through influence rather than authority, they exemplify what it means to be a force multiplier - empowering teams, shaping strategy, and anchoring WISEcode’s mission in technical excellence.
How WISEcode Principal Engineers Operate
At WISEcode, Principal Engineers are not permanently embedded within a single product or team. Instead, they operate as a bench of elite technical “ninjas” who move fluidly between initiatives, stepping in wherever the company’s most complex architectural or strategic challenges exist. Whether it’s designing the foundation for a new AI-driven scoring system, untangling a data pipeline bottleneck, or accelerating delivery of a critical cross-product feature, they are deployed to maximize impact across the organization.
While they are not permanently assigned to any team, they may temporarily embed within a product team to jump-start a complicated feature or initiative - especially those that require deep architectural foresight and rapid hands-on execution. Their broad, full-stack expertise allows them to implement a large feature soup to nuts, bridging frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure layers to deliver a working, production-ready solution. Once the foundation is established and the pattern is clear, they transition ownership back to the core team, leaving behind a scalable design and higher engineering confidence.
Because of their broad visibility and ability to connect disparate systems and priorities, WISEcode Principal Engineers often report directly to the CTO. This structure allows them to operate autonomously while ensuring tight alignment with company strategy, technical standards, and long-term platform evolution. Their work is not measured by lines of code committed to one repository, but by the cumulative architectural integrity, performance, and adaptability of WISEcode’s entire ecosystem - as well as their ability to jump-start new products or strategically critical, technically demanding features that accelerate the company’s roadmap and set new standards for excellence.
By design, this model makes Principal Engineers a force multiplier for every team they touch. They leave behind better patterns, cleaner abstractions, and higher technical maturity than they found - raising the overall bar for engineering across WISEcode. Their presence is temporary by assignment but lasting in influence, as they document, mentor, and codify best practices that enable product teams to scale independently with confidence and clarity.
AI Skills and Leadership
At WISEcode, AI literacy is not optional - it is foundational. Every engineer, regardless of discipline, is expected to understand and leverage AI tools, frameworks, and methodologies as part of their daily craft. Principal Engineers embody this mindset at the highest level, serving as both practitioners and enablers of WISEcode’s AI-driven future. They integrate machine learning, natural language processing, and data-centric automation directly into product architectures and workflows, ensuring that intelligence and adaptability are designed in - not bolted on.
For Principal Engineers, AI is a horizontal strength as well as a vertical specialty. Even if it is not their deepest technical domain, their understanding runs deep enough to evaluate model performance, guide data quality standards, and architect systems that can learn, evolve, and reason over time. They recognize that AI is not a standalone feature but a force multiplier - amplifying decision-making, personalization, and efficiency across every layer of the platform, from ingestion to user experience.
Their role is to bridge human and machine intelligence - helping product, data, and engineering teams apply AI responsibly and effectively. They lead by example, experimenting with generative models, AI-assisted development, and algorithmic code generation to continuously improve speed, quality, and innovation. They also help set the standards for ethical use of AI, transparency in model outputs, and explainability of results, ensuring that every intelligent feature reinforces WISEcode’s mission of trust and consumer empowerment.
In doing so, WISEcode Principal Engineers define what it means to be an AI-native technologist: grounded in real engineering, fluent in data and algorithms, and capable of weaving intelligence seamlessly into products that shape the future of personalized nutrition. Their fluency in AI - both broad and sufficiently deep - ensures that the organization’s technical vision stays aligned with its strategic commitment to make every product, dataset, and codebase smarter over time
Requirements
- BSCS or equivalent engineering degree
- 12+ years of strong development experience
- Extensive experience as a full stack engineer with .NET, ASP.NET and Postgres
- Strong knowledge of ORM frameworks and BLAZE
- Proven ability to design and scale enterprise-grade systems with architectural design leadership
- Track record of technical leadership, mentoring, and cross-team influence
- Broad systems thinking with depth in multiple technical domains
- Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and ability to apply them responsibly in product development
Medical
Dental
Vision
401(k)
and other ancillary benefits offerings, along with Paid Time Off for vacation, illness, and other types of leave.
WISEcode is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, please send a request to WISEcode Human Resources at jobs@wisecode.ai.
Top Skills
.Net
Blaze
Orm Frameworks
Postgres
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