# Principal Software Engineer

**Company:** [Plenful](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/plenful)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Python, Postgres, AWS, Temporal, TypeScript, React, Graph Databases, Distributed Systems, Schema Evolution, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-04-23

> Architects and owns the data foundation including context graph and decision tracing for Plenful's AI-powered pharmacy automation platform. Requires 12+ years in data architecture, expertise in relational databases, distributed systems, and Python in regulated domains.

## Job Description

## Key Objectives
- Architect the domain model, context graph, workflow state, actions, and decision history
- Define how institutional memory is represented, versioned, queried, and evolved
- Build systems that are expressive enough for AI-driven workflows while remaining governed, testable, and auditable
- Ensure the platform scales from approximately 90 customers today to 200+ without degrading reliability
- Reduce hero-dependence by building abstractions that prevent constant escalations

## What You’ll Own
### Long-Term Data Architecture Strategy
- Define the canonical data model for workflows, context, actions, and outcomes
- Design durable abstractions across automation, decision tracing, and system memory
- Establish clear system boundaries across feature-based teams

### Context Graph & Institutional Memory
- Architect a graph-backed representation of state, history, and reasoning
- Enable traceability of decisions across complex healthcare workflows
- Ensure schema evolution supports regulatory scrutiny and auditability

### Workflow State & High-Volume Systems
- Design state management systems across AWS, Postgres, Python, and Temporal workflows
- Drive performance, reliability, and scalability across high-throughput workflows
- Own normalization tradeoffs, indexing strategy, and access pattern design

### Engineering Standards & Guardrails
- Establish standards for schema versioning, lineage, testing, and data integrity
- Build systems that reduce incident frequency and escalation dependency
- Partner with tech leads across feature teams to enforce architectural coherence

## Must Have
- 12+ years owning data architecture in large-scale production systems
- Deep relational database and distributed systems expertise
- Strong experience evolving schemas in complex, regulated domains
- Clear judgment on normalization vs. denormalization, performance tradeoffs, and system boundaries
- Experience handling mission-critical incidents in production
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fuzzy problem spaces
- Hands-on coding ability in a Python-heavy backend environment
- Strong reliability instincts, including observability, testing, and QA rigor

## Nice to Have
- Experience in healthcare, fintech, or infrastructure environments
- Exposure to or experience with modern, scaled, high-throughput infrastructure environments such as Stripe, Brex, or Notion
- Practical understanding of applied AI systems (not pure ML research)
- Comfort in customer-facing technical discussions

## Perks
- Comprehensive Benefits Package: unlimited PTO, fully covered health insurance (medical, dental, and vision), meal stipend, health & wellness stipend, 401(k) matching, and stock options

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/552d7658-afd9-439a-8b1c-cf5a08d88c5a
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