Principal Software Engineer – Backend Employment Type: Full-Time Location: Remote (Preferred: Dallas, TX) About DeepHow DeepHow is a Physical AI platform serving industrial manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and utilities. The platform enables organizations to capture expert knowledge, transform it into dynamic work instructions, and drive verified execution across frontline operations. DeepHow's platform combines: Knowledge capture and sharing AI-powered verification through Smart Compare and photo/video validation Guided workflows and SOP adherence Time and motion intelligence Real-time execution visibility By connecting knowledge capture with verified execution, DeepHow helps organizations improve operational efficiency, workforce productivity, and process compliance. Position Overview We are seeking an experienced Principal Software Engineer – Backend to lead the architecture, development, and optimization of our backend systems. This role is ideal for a highly technical leader who thrives in fast-paced startup environments and has a proven track record of building scalable, cloud-native SaaS platforms. You will play a critical role in shaping our technical direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering high-quality solutions that support AI-powered products and large-scale data-intensive applications. Key Responsibilities Lead the architecture, design, development, and optimization of scalable, high-performance backend systems that support business growth and product innovation. Define technical roadmaps, architectural standards, and engineering best practices while providing technical leadership and mentorship to development teams. Develop and maintain backend applications, APIs, microservices, and automation solutions using Node.js and Python. Design, deploy, and manage cloud-native infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, App Engine, Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and Helm to ensure scalable and repeatable deployments. Build and maintain observability frameworks, including monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, and Google Cloud Monitoring. Monitor and optimize production machine learning workloads, including model performance, operational health, and data drift detection. Design and manage scalable data architectures using PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and Firestore, while developing large-scale data pipelines and supporting dataset versioning practices with tools such as DVC and LakeFS. Deploy, manage, and optimize containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes (GKE), including multi-tenant architectures, RBAC, namespace isolation, and resource management. Design secure cloud networking solutions involving VPCs, load balancers, and network security controls while implementing secure authentication and authorization using OAuth and SAML. Establish and maintain infrastructure security best practices, including encryption, secrets management, service account governance, and credential rotation. Build and enhance CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and support GitOps workflows with tools such as ArgoCD and Flux. Improve application performance, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance while implementing asynchronous processing frameworks such as Temporal and Celery. Integrate ML frameworks, model lifecycle tools, and model-serving platforms, including PyTorch, Ray, Hugging Face, MLflow, Weights & Biases, BentoML, Triton, and TorchServe, within scalable Kubernetes environments. Required Qualifications Education Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Equivalent practical experience will also be considered. Experience 10+ years of backend software engineering experience. Proven track record of designing, building, and scaling production-grade systems. Prior experience in a SaaS company is required. Strong experience in cloud-native environments and distributed systems. Previous experience in a: Principal Engineer Staff Engineer Senior Lead Engineer role with ownership of architecture and system design. Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineering teams. Experience working in startup or high-growth environments is strongly preferred.