Principal AI-Native Software Engineer

About this role

OUR MISSION

ButterflyMX is on a mission to empower people to open and manage doors & gates from a smartphone. Our products are installed in more than 20,000+ multifamily, commercial, gated communities, and student-housing properties worldwide, including properties developed, owned, and managed by the most trusted names in real estate. Our features are designed for developers, owners, property managers, and tenants and our products lower operating costs and improve tenant satisfaction.

OUR SOLUTION

Developers and owners no longer need to run building wiring or install in-unit hardware. Property managers can grant building access, revoke permissions, and review entry logs from an online dashboard. Residents can open doors from their smartphones, issue visitor access, and see who is trying to enter the building.

OUR CULTURE & VALUES

Fantastic people are the key to our success. As a distributed, primarily remote workforce, we’re looking for more intelligent, passionate, collaborative, ai-forward, and down-to-earth individuals to join our growing team. We’re driven by a shared commitment to excellence and innovation, grounded in our core values: We delight our customers, We take ownership, We are a community of collaborators, We speak up, We think big and do small, and We are tenacious.

ROLE OVERVIEW

We are looking for an exceptional Principal or Staff-level engineer who has fundamentally changed how they build software because of AI. This is not a traditional software engineering role with an AI assistant bolted on. We want someone who uses AI agents, especially Claude Code, to independently take well-defined product initiatives from business requirements to secure, tested, production-ready software.

The ideal candidate is an excellent backend engineer first, grounded in our stack: TypeScript services, MongoDB and relational data, and cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP. AI dramatically increases your output, but your engineering judgment is what makes that output valuable.

In this role, you will work closely with our Product and Design teams. You will operate with unusually broad engineering ownership. You may clarify requirements with Product, develop the technical specification, work through implementation details with Design, coordinate multiple coding agents, review their work, deploy the application, manage its infrastructure, and continue improving the product after launch.

The ideal candidate is already working this way. You routinely operate several Claude Code sessions or agents in parallel. You know how to divide work across agents, provide them with the right context, establish effective feedback loops, and keep multiple workstreams moving without losing control of quality or architecture.

You believe manually writing code should become a relatively rare part of software development. But you are not impressed by code merely because an AI generated it. You recognize over-engineered "AI slop," unnecessary abstractions, sprawling diffs, weak tests, insecure implementations, and solutions that are technically functional but fundamentally poor.

RESPONSIBILITIES

PARTNER WITH PRODUCT AND DESIGN

- Work closely with Product to understand business requirements, intended user outcomes, priorities, constraints, and acceptance criteria.

- Translate Product's business requirements into clear technical requirements, implementation plans, system behaviors, and engineering tasks.

- Identify technical ambiguities, dependencies, risks, edge cases, and tradeoffs that must be resolved before or during implementation.

- Ask the questions necessary to ensure the engineering solution addresses the actual product need.

- Partner with Design to understand intended user workflows and translate designs into complete, functional product experiences.

- Provide Product and Design with clear feedback when requirements or designs introduce unnecessary complexity, technical risk, security concerns, or operational challenges.

- Preserve the intent of the product requirements while making sound technical and implementation decisions.

- Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changes in scope clearly throughout development.

BUILD AND OWN PRODUCTS END TO END

- Take approved product initiatives from business requirements through technical design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation.

- Manage several products or major engineering initiatives with limited day-to-day oversight.

- Develop complete technical requirements from the business and product requirements supplied by Product.

- Make thoughtful architectural, implementation, security, infrastructure, and operational tradeoffs within an established platform direction.

- Design, build, and maintain efficient, reusable, reliable, and testable code; identify bottlenecks and bugs, devise solutions, and propose optimizations.

- Deliver working software quickly while maintaining high standards for reliability, maintainability, security, and user experience.

- Own the technical execution of a product rather than waiting for every implementation detail to be specified.

- Continue improving products after launch based on feedback, usage, defects, and changing requirements.

OPERATE AN AI-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

- Use Claude Code as a primary development environment and orchestration layer.

- Run multiple agents, sub-agents, worktrees, branches, or development sessions in parallel.

- Decompose technical requirements into work that can be executed safely and effectively by different agents.

- Design reusable Claude Code skills, commands, hooks, context files, agent instructions, and development workflows.

- Provide agents with the technical requirements, architectural context, constraints, designs, examples, and verification methods necessary to produce high-quality work.

- Build feedback loops in which agents review, test, critique, and improve one another's output.

- Use ag

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