Principal Engineer

ABOUT BRANDLIGHT Brandlight is the leading enterprise AI visibility platform, built to help the world’s leading brands understand, manage, and optimize how they appear across AI-driven search, commerce, and advertising. As AI rapidly becomes a trillion-dollar marketing and distribution channel, Brandlight is defining the systems that decide how brands are surfaced, trusted, and chosen. Join our team and help build the next generation of tools shaping the future of brand management in an AI-first world. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for a Principal Engineer who combines strong product instincts, deep engineering skills, and the ability to move fast without compromising on execution quality. You’ll be a primary technical driver, taking significant product modules from concept through design, architecture, implementation, and production. You won’t just implement finished specifications, you’ll partner with product and design to shape the solution, make technical decisions, and own delivery end to end. Your work will turn complex, large-scale data into fast, intuitive products for Fortune 500 marketing teams. You’ll build across the data and application stack - from data ingestion and ETL pipelines to scalable backend services and the APIs that power our product experience. This role combines strong backend development with hands-on data engineering, owning how data is collected, transformed, stored, and served to make exploring datasets with billions of records feel effortless. Whether your strength is backend or full-stack, you’ll have room to contribute across the product. This is a hands-on role for someone who has driven meaningful product development in a fast-growing startup and is comfortable taking ownership before every requirement has been defined. Responsibilities - Own complete product modules from concept to production. - Build and own production data pipelines. - Design scalable data models and APIs. - Build fast, reliable services that power data-intensive product experiences. - Drive performance across the system, from data layer to user experience. - Ensure data quality and reliability. - Create reusable product foundations. - Own production reliability and safe delivery. - Lead through hands-on execution. Requirements - 5+ years of experience as a backend or full-stack engineer, building and shipping data-intensive production web applications, with strong hands-on backend development skills. - A proven track record as a primary technical driver at a fast-growing startup. - Strong backend engineering skills, including API design, service architecture, caching, asynchronous processing, and integrating external systems. - Hands-on data engineering experience, including building, deploying, and maintaining production ETL/ELT pipelines. - Strong SQL and data modeling skills, with experience preparing and serving large datasets for analytical workloads. - Demonstrated ability to diagnose and improve performance across the system. - Experience deploying and operating applications and data pipelines in a cloud environment, including CI/CD, automated testing, containerization, logging, monitoring, and production debugging. - Strong product judgment, clear communication, and proactive ownership. Nice to Have - Frontend experience building polished, data-intensive interfaces and visualizations. WHY JOIN US At Brandlight, you’ll build and shape a new category at the intersection of AI, marketing, and commerce. We’re a fast-growing startup led by repeat entrepreneurs, world-class engineers, and marketing leaders, all driven to reinvent how brands are built, discovered, and chosen in the age of AI.