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Role Description

We are looking for an experienced, product-focused Principal Product Engineer with a strong frontend orientation to join our internal innovation lab at Coforma. The innovation lab is a small, autonomous team building a new product from scratch. We operate with the speed of a startup but the stability of an established company, with the goal of creating a new digital service that may grow into its own offering.

As a Principal Product Engineer, you’ll be a deeply hands-on technical leader shaping how we design, build, and ship modern applications in a fast-moving R&D environment. Reporting to our Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), you’ll bring strong, opinionated, experience-backed judgment around frontend architecture, particularly in modern React and Next.js ecosystems, and make pragmatic decisions that balance speed of learning with long-term maintainability.

You’ll mentor other engineers, model a strong product-engineering culture, and help the team navigate the ambiguity that comes with early-stage product development and experimentation. This is a full-stack role with a frontend center of gravity:

• Lead from the frontend, setting patterns for React and Next.js applications, data-fetching strategies, UI and state architecture, and overall product experience.
• Comfortable owning backend services and APIs as needed.
• Help build the foundational frontend and application platform for our innovation lab from the ground up.
• Work in close collaboration with a small set of product, design, and leadership partners to quickly test, iterate, and ship new modular products.

This role is intentionally scoped for early-stage execution before a dedicated team is hired. We’re looking for engineers who enjoy building quickly with modern web frameworks and who can also design and build systems that hold up as products grow and mature.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience in product-oriented environments, with a strong frontend focus.
• Deep hands-on experience building production applications in Next.js, including modern React patterns, App Router, and TypeScript.
• Strong backend experience in Node.js, with preference for NestJS, and comfort owning API design end-to-end.
• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and consuming APIs including GraphQL and REST, and deploying to modern cloud environments (preferably GCP).
• Proven track record of shipping full-stack web applications from prototype to production, with particular strength in frontend architecture, performance, and developer experience.
• 4+ years of experience leading technical direction or serving as tech lead/architect on complex products.
• Deep experience with React/TypeScript and at least one modern back-end stack (Node, Python, Go, etc.).
• Comfortable operating in startup-style ambiguity, designing experiments, measuring outcomes, and iterating quickly based on real user feedback.
• Full-time resident of the contiguous United States (must be legally authorized to work in the US now and in the future without sponsorship).

Requirements

• Strong grasp of the building blocks of the web (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSON, TLS/SSL), with particular depth in modern frontend application architecture.
• Deep experience with React and Next.js, including routing, data fetching patterns, performance optimization, and building resilient, user-centric UIs that interact cleanly with APIs.
• Solid backend engineering fundamentals, with hands-on experience building cloud-native Node.js services (preferably NestJS), including API design (GraphQL preferred), data modeling, and service boundaries.
• Practical experience implementing secure authentication and authorization flows (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML), and designing APIs that are safe to consume from browser-based clients.
• Familiarity with event-driven and asynchronous processing, distributed caching, observability and logging, and modern persistence patterns that support frontend-driven product experiences.
• Capable of delivering application architectures and code that are highly scalable, available, and performant.
• Understanding of security and compliance implications (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP) for SaaS-style products and ability to design with them in mind.
• Skilled at tailoring technical communication for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders and able to explain complex trade-offs in plain language to influence decisions and align teams.

Benefits

• $174,399 to $187,006 Annual Salary + Benefits + Growth Potential.
• Placement within this range will be based on the competency level of the candidate.
• An offer will be made at one of the following tiers:
• Tier 1 - $174,399.60: Meets minimum qualification/experience requirements.
• Tier 2 - $181,543.68: Experienced and fully competent.
• Tier 3 - $187,006.80: Highly experienced and can perform all responsibilities of the role at a higher level than expected.
• To honor our company-wide equitable pay system, the posted salary range and corresponding tier salaries are non-negotiable.

Other

• Internet: Will prioritize and maintain access to strong, reliable internet for the remote nature of our work, except when on vacation or holiday.
• Security: Will keep the highest security practices to ensure privacy and security of Coforma and client information, given the nature of our work, even when on vacation.
• Travel Flexibility: On request and with advanced notice, will attend in-person events such as meetings, workshops, and trainings as assigned for projects that require it.
• Brand Representation: Will represent Coforma professionally and sincerely, modeling our Company Values in all interactions.