Principal Software Engineer, AI & Platform
Koala Health, Remote
The role
At Koala Health, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to make managing your pet’s health simple and delightful. We’ve already launched our pharmacy service that allows people to shop for their pets’ medications and supplements online and get them delivered to their doorstep in presorted medication pouches. Now we’re focused on continuing to improve that experience while building a suite of new products and services that will make the pet health experience even better.
We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader across the engineering organization. This is a highly hands-on role for an experienced engineer who enjoys building production systems while also influencing architecture, engineering standards, developer productivity, and the adoption of AI throughout the software development lifecycle.You will work closely with engineering, product, operations, and company leadership to identify opportunities, define technical direction, and drive execution on initiatives that have company-wide impact.Success in this role means:
- Architecting systems that scale with the business.
- Raising engineering quality and operational excellence.
- Accelerating development velocity through effective use of AI.
- Establishing best practices for AI-assisted and agentic software development.
- Mentoring engineers and helping the team make better technical decisions.
- Leveraging technology to simplify complex operational workflows and improve customer experiences.
What you need
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating complex, production-scale systems.
- Expert-level Ruby on Rails experience with strong knowledge of modern web application architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Proven experience leading technical architecture, driving engineering direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering reliable, observable, high-performing systems.
- Strong product and business judgment with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Deep expertise with modern AI development, including LLMs, AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot), and building AI-powered products, agents, automation, or developer workflows.
- Understanding of agent architectures, retrieval systems, tool-calling, evaluation frameworks, and AI system reliability, with a demonstrated ability to use AI to improve engineering velocity and team effectiveness.
- Authorization to work in the United States (Koala is not able to sponsor visas for this role).