Principal Software Engineer, Public Sector (f/m/d)

Description

The company helps businesses spot supplier failures, cyber attacks, factory fires and floods early, before they disrupt supply chains. Its customers include BMW Group, Hilti and Lufthansa, and it gives them live views of supply chain risk.

Governments have the same problem at a bigger scale. During COVID, European governments took months to learn which firms could make basic medical equipment. After Russia invaded Ukraine, finding ammunition producers was just as slow. When a port shuts or an export ban appears overnight, most governments still cannot tell which industries are exposed, who could fill the gap, or how fast.

The company is now building a new product for the public sector in Europe, starting from nothing. The team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to take ownership of large parts of it from day one, end to end. The ideal person uses AI as a default in their work and knows when to rely on their own judgment.

The role is closer to a founding engineer at a startup than to a lead in a large organisation. You will shape product decisions alongside technical ones and set the standards the team builds to. The questions are concrete and difficult. Which European manufacturers rely on one supplier for a critical material? If that supplier failed tomorrow, who could cover the shortfall and how quickly? How do you answer that with data its owners guard closely?

A typical day could include writing the spec for a new capability in the morning, running several agents on it and reviewing their output, debugging a Kubernetes deployment in the afternoon, and reworking a user interface after walking a public sector user through a prototype. The team works agent-first: coding agents write most of the code, while engineers own the specs, the architecture and the quality of everything shipped.

Responsibilities

• Own whole areas of the public sector product end to end, from architecture and UX to frontend, backend and infrastructure, through to running it in production
• Help decide what gets built as well as how. Much of the scope is still undefined, and you will help define it
• Run the agent-first workflow by writing specs, setting architecture and reviewing every change
• Keep reliability, security and maintainability intact while moving quickly with agents
• Run and improve the platform the team operates itself, including Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, identity, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and monitoring, and fix it when it breaks
• Ship your first change in your first week, and within a few months steer a part of the system you know better than anyone

Requirements

• Have 7+ years of experience building and shipping complex full-stack web applications that people relied on and kept running. Fewer years is fine if you have something real to show
• Are an expert in TypeScript and the web stack, from browsers, HTML and CSS to APIs and backend services, using technologies such as React and Node.js
• Have a strong sense of how a product should look and feel. Early UI decisions are yours as much as engineering ones
• Work across the whole stack, from infrastructure and DevOps (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD) to UI and UX, and deploy and operate what you build
• Have solid engineering fundamentals: system design, data modelling, testing, security and running software in production
• Are deeply fluent in agentic coding and keep up as the tools change. You know what current agents can do, where they fail and how to set up a project so they perform well. You build the specs, tests, architecture checks and monitoring that show when their code is wrong
• Enjoy the hardest and least defined problems. You take ambiguous questions, decide what to build, work through them with users and partners, and follow up after launch. Nobody will hand you a spec
• Speak and write fluent English and hold a valid work permit for Austria
• Have experience with further languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Rust or Python, and the judgment to pick a different language when it fits better
• Have experience with Electron, cryptography, or LLM-based agents and products
• Hold a degree in computer science, data science, engineering, mathematics or a related field

Conditions

Pay is at least EUR 75,000 gross per year. This is the legally required minimum. The actual package, including any variable pay such as a bonus scheme, depends on your qualifications and experience

Flexible hours and hybrid working

Work from anywhere for up to 6 weeks a year

The team works with a small, senior group who challenge ideas, and the work moves fast with a brief that is not always complete

Benefits

• A day off on your birthday
• A MyClubs partnership
• Mental health support
• Regular health check-ups and wellness initiatives
• Company-wide training
• Team events
• Device of your choice