Principal Engineer:

Big Data, Agentic AI, and Geospatial Systems Confidential retained search | Utah strongly preferred | Full time We are partnering with a profitable, growing SaaS company on a confidential search for a rockstar Principal Engineer. This is a pure builder role on a small, elite team. No org chart to climb. No managers to manage. No strategy decks. You will spend your time doing the thing most senior engineers say they miss: architecting and writing software against one of the most interesting proprietary datasets in the country. Because this search is confidential, this description is intentionally light on identifying details. The company, the product, and the full scope are shared in the first conversation. The Company Established, profitable, and self-funded. Strong cash flow, growing fast, no outside capital needed and none wanted. Their platform is mission-critical software, deeply embedded in how their customers operate, deployed at scale across much of the United States. Years of implementations have produced something rare: a proprietary dataset of national scope, plus a working understanding of how that data gets created, stored, and mangled in the real world. The work carries genuine public-safety significance. What this team builds will help save lives, not just move a metric. Small team, high trust, minimal process. Each engineer owns significant ground. The Mission Build the most accurate, most complete dataset of its kind in the world, and the intelligent systems that turn it into insight. That is the thesis, straight from the CEO.

The raw material:

millions of records describing real-world physical events, each one tied to a time and a place, recorded by trained professionals working under difficult field conditions.

The work:

unify that data into a single national system, then enrich it relentlessly with third-party and derived sources. Event schedules. Environmental conditions. Infrastructure characteristics derived from imagery and sensor data. Every variable that could explain why an event happened, connected to the event itself, then interrogated with statistical and agentic tooling until insights surface that no one has ever been able to see. We need a strong rockstar engineer that LOVES problem solving, big data, Ai, and creating tools that benefit the world and saves lives! The Problems You Will Solve Scale. An enormous and growing dataset with a heavy geospatial component. Ingestion, transformation, storage, and retrieval that hold up as the data multiplies. Data quality. The source records are created by humans in the field, and they contain real problems: attribute combinations that make no physical sense, coded fields that contradict the written narrative, locations that fail basic sanity checks. You will build systems that detect, flag, and correct these issues at scale. Enrichment and connection. Associating every event with its temporal context and its physical context. Entity resolution and spatial joins across wildly heterogeneous sources. Insight generation. Statistical analysis and agentic AI systems that reason across the enriched data, find correlations, and surface findings a human analyst would never reach alone. What You Will Do Write production code, most days. You join/lead two engineers and a deep GIS specialist as the third engineer on the team, not as their manager. Architect and build pipelines that ingest, cleanse, normalize, and connect large primary, geospatial, and third-party datasets. Design and ship automated data quality systems: anomaly detection, coherence checks, geospatial validation. Prototype, evaluate, and productionize agentic workflows and statistical tooling over the dataset, with real attention to reliability, evaluation, and oversight. Make architectural decisions, own them, and establish patterns the rest of the team can extend. What We Are Looking For A genuinely strong engineer, likely 10+ years in, who still loves opening the codebase and would rather solve a hard technical problem than sit in a planning meeting. A heavy hitter on big data: distributed systems, data-intensive applications, large-scale pipelines, and thoughtful data modeling. Real experience with modern AI systems: LLMs, retrieval, tool use, orchestration, or agentic architectures you have actually built, not just bolted on. Data science instincts are a strong plus: statistics, correlation analysis, machine learning applied to messy real-world data. Geospatial experience is a strong plus: GIS data, spatial indexing (H3 or similar), imagery-derived or sensor-derived datasets. Low ego, high ownership. A great teammate who will solve whatever problem is most important, regardless of whose job it technically is. Bachelor's in CS or similar; MS preferred. Utah candidates strongly preferred. This Role Is Right for You If You get your joy from the problem itself. The data being amazing and correct is the win condition. You want to build alongside a small, elite team where each person carries real weight. You can operate without layers of process, management, or hand-holding. You read "the most complete dataset of its kind in the world" and immediately started thinking about how you would build it. This Role Is Not Right for You If You want to lead through managers, or you are ready to step back from code. You gravitate toward business strategy in technical conversations. This company has product, sales, and commercial direction covered. They are not hiring a thought partner on where to take the business; they are hiring a builder. We will want your brain to figure out a lot of this tool in the business and there will be lots of strategy involved, but we want your technical genius first. You are primarily a BI, reporting, analytics, or data governance leader without deep software engineering underneath. Your AI experience amounts to selecting vendors or adding a chat feature to an existing app. If building a definitive national dataset, and the intelligent systems on top of it, sounds like the most fun you could have at work, let's talk. We will tell you exactly who and what it is on the first call.

Pay:

$180,000.00 - $250,000.00 per year

Benefits:

Dental insurance Health insurance Paid time off Vision insurance Application Question(s): This role has no direct reports today and is 80 percent hands-on building, and 20% strategy. Does that excite you or feel like a step back?

Experience:

development: 8 years (Required)

Work Location:

Hybrid remote in Draper, UT 84020