Principal Engineer - Stackpoint Ventures

Stackpoint Studio Inc

Boston, MA, USA

Published: 6/14/2022

Engineering

Full Time

Job Description

About Stackpoint Ventures

Stackpoint is a venture studio that conceives, builds, and scales companies at the intersection of real estate, finance, and technology. Led by co-founders who have both built unicorn real estate tech companies from scratch, we're a team of expert operators with decades of experience building products, teams, and businesses from startup to scale.

We focus all of our energy on discovering and solving customer and business problems, designing financially strong and defensible business models, activating growth engines, hiring world-class founding teams, and helping them thrive (and none of our energy on big-company b.s.). We launch 3-4 companies per year. Our dedicated capital, experienced team, proven process, and deep strategic network supercharge founders and accelerate growth. We're based in Boston but have a distributed team, work remotely and come together every quarter for in-person team building.

Position overview

We are seeking an experienced, hands-on, collaborative full-stack Software Engineer to play a critical role across our company creation process. This individual will architect, design and build products from scratch while partnering closely with our startup CEOs and the other members of our studio team (including design, product, marketing and finance). This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in 0-1 environments—those who get energy from the ambiguity of early-stage building and have a track record of shipping products from nothing to launch.

This position is an excellent opportunity for those passionate about product discovery, startup creation, and working in a close-knit team of skilled, hands-on operators who are deeply committed to their craft and to each other. Additionally, it offers the chance to gain significant startup equity while diversifying risk, as all team members own equity in each company we build.

Responsibilities

Software design and development: architect, design, and build robust backend systems and responsive frontends.
Infrastructure set-up: establish and manage the infrastructure for each product, including cloud environment configuration, CI/CD implementation, security, monitoring & logging and scalability enablement.
AI tooling and integration: evaluate, adopt, and integrate AI-powered development tools and capabilities into our workflows and products—from leveraging AI coding assistants to embedding LLM features into customer-facing applications. Enable our internal teams and portfolio companies to be "AI First"
Product collaboration: work closely with our product managers, designers and founding CEOs to translate vetted concepts into functional products.
Technical recruiting and team building: serve as the technical face of recruiting efforts—selling the vision, architecture, and technical opportunity to prospective Head of Engineering candidates and senior ICs. Help our startup CEOs build their full-time tech teams as part of our overall work to help companies become fully independent of studio resources within 9-12 months of launch.
Tech leadership: stay current on AI-powered development tools, emerging frameworks, and best practices. Advocate for tech choices and make decisions that prioritize scalability, maintainability and user experience.

Required capabilities + experience

Having hired a lot of engineers over the years we fully recognize no single human being will be A+ on every dimension we've listed below. Strong candidates will spike on many of these dimensions, and be willing and able to upskill as needed over time.

Technical skills

Frontend Development: Proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, including frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.js. Capable of crafting responsive web designs and implementing UI/UX best practices.
Backend Development: Skilled in server-side languages like Python (Django, Flask), Ruby (Ruby on Rails), JavaScript (Node.js with Express.js), Java, GO, etc. Demonstrated ability to make sound, scalable technology decisions tailored to the problem and solution at hand. Strong, recent experience building and managing the full lifecycle of heavy server-side products, including integrations, API development, data transformation, and web applications.
Cloud Infrastructure: Experienced with cloud platforms such as AWS (EC2, S3), Azure (Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Functions), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Proficient in cloud-based architecture and deployment.
Database Management: Proficient in establishing and developing on both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra) databases. Adept in database design, optimization, implementation, and platform selection.
DevOps Practices: Knowledgeable in DevOps tools and practices, including continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) using tools like Jenkins, GitLab, or CircleCI, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
AI Tools and Integration: Fluent in modern AI-powered development workflows—comfortable using tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude for coding assistance. Experienced in integrating LLMs and AI capabilities into production applications, including prompt engineering, API integration, and evaluating cost/performance tradeoffs. Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape and can make pragmatic decisions about when and how to adopt new tools.

People skills

Technical recruiting + mentorship: A critical part of this role is helping recruit world-class technical talent for our portfolio companies. This means being able to credibly sell the technical vision, architecture decisions, and growth opportunity to senior candidates—especially for Head of Engineering roles and strong senior ICs. You should be someone engineers want to work with and learn from. Has built a network of loyal and talented software engineers and is passionate about developing and mentoring junior team members.
Cross-functional partnership in a startup environment: Excels at and enjoys collaborating with product, design and others to discover the right problems and solutions as we build new companies. Possesses a strong capacity to envision the art of the possible, while also weighing technical feasibility. Values being user-led in the discovery process, yet bold enough to take necessary leaps and adopt a "build to learn" approach. Enjoys working collaboratively in the unstructured space of early-stage development to help teams launch products that create lasting value for users and customers
Startup pace + resourcefulness: Capable of producing high-quality work rapidly. Understands the importance of making pragmatic tradeoffs in a startup environment, particularly during the iterative process of achieving product-market fit.

Experience

0-1 company building (required): Demonstrated experience architecting, building, deploying, and iterating on multiple products from scratch in a 0-1 startup context. This is not a nice-to-have—we need someone who has lived the chaos of early-stage building and thrives in it.
7+ years' experience: Possesses more than 7 years of cumulative experience in software engineering roles, ideally with significant exposure to high-caliber, modern product/engineering cultures.
Diverse Company Stage Experience: Has experience working in various stages of company development, from startups to large-scale operations.
Variety in Business Models: Skilled in developing products across different business models, including B2C (Business-to-Consumer), B2B (Business-to-Business), and B2B2C (Business-to-Business-to-Consumer).

Personal qualities

Intense Curiosity and Learning Mindset: Continuously develops and refines engineering skills through hands-on learning and building. Prefers practical application and experimentation — "learning through building" — over theoretical study.
First Principles Thinking: Proficient in devising effective solutions from first principles. Capable of creating innovative system designs using emerging technologies like Generative AI, even in the absence of established architectural or system design patterns.
Team-Oriented Approach: Excels in collaborative work within cross-functional teams, prioritizing the team's overall success over individual goals.
Entrepreneurial Spirit: Passionate about the startup ecosystem, including its culture, origins, and ethos. Thrives in transforming inertia into momentum and ambiguity into clarity. Highly driven to create value through building impactful solutions.
Effective Communication: Skilled in conveying complex technical concepts to non-technical partners and stakeholders in a clear and understandable manner.

Comp, benefits and location

We're well-funded by a network of leading investors and offer competitive cash compensation in addition to equity in our portfolio of startups, along with comprehensive benefits, including health, vision, and dental insurance, generous paid time off/sick leave, and a 401(k) plan.

The majority of our team is based in Boston, with others located in New York, California, Colorado and Idaho. We work remotely, and come together every quarter for team building.

If you're eager to make a meaningful impact by collaborating with founders to build lasting companies, and you're interested in joining Stackpoint at an early stage in our mission to become the world's most successful and respected venture studio, we'd be delighted to hear from you!