Principal Engineer

Cocoon

Actively Hiring

AI-Driven Property Intelligence and Service Fulfillment

Principal Engineer

• $90k – $120k • 0.0% – 2.0%
• Remote (South America • Central America +1)
• 8 years of exp
• Contract

Reposted: yesterday Recruiter recently active

Hires remotely in South America - Central America - Latin America

Remote Work Policy Remote only

Company Location

New York City

Visa Sponsorship Not Available

Preferred Timezones Eastern Time

RelocationNot Allowed

Skills

• Java
• Software Development
• Distributed Systems
• PostgreSQL
• Hibernate
• JPA
• System Design
• Amazon Web Services
• REST APIs
• Docker
• Springboot
• Relational Database Design
• AWS Aurora
• CI/CD
• Generative AI
• LLMs

About the job

About Cocoon

Cocoon is a seed-stage home intelligence and service platform that is redefining the future of homeownership by making it more proactive, intelligent and easier to manage. We have built and deployed a production platform and we are expanding through insurance carriers, real estate, mortgage and other embedded channels to help homeowners maintain and protect their homes.

Our platform connects property intelligence, homeowner engagement and service fulfillment to help homeowners better understand, maintain and protect their homes while enabling insurance carriers and other business partners to move from identifying property risk to addressing and verifying risk mitigation.

The Role

Cocoon is seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer who combines the architectural judgment of a senior engineering leader with the desire to be deeply hands-on in software development.

We are looking for someone who wants to become a long-term member of Cocoon's core team, participate meaningfully in the company's success and operate with the ownership and responsibility expected of a senior company leader.

Serving as Cocoon's primary internal technical authority and source of technical truth, you will own technical architecture and engineering decisions in alignment with the company's product and business priorities.

You will inherit an existing sophisticated platform rather than a greenfield environment. Your responsibility will be to understand that system deeply, determine what should be preserved, identify what should be improved and lead the evolution of the platform's technical foundation in line with product and business strategy.

One of your core initial responsibilities will be evolving Cocoon's data architecture from its current relatively flat structure into a robust relational model capable of supporting increasingly sophisticated property intelligence, automation and AI capabilities.

You will work alongside an engineering team including, a senior full-stack engineer, business analyst, and specialized outsourced resources. You may also have other engineering support as required.

Core Responsibilities

Technical Architecture & Leadership

• Serve as Cocoon's primary internal authority on system architecture, data architecture, system design and engineering quality.
• Own technical architecture and engineering decisions.
• Spearhead Cocoon's efforts to build native AI-driven capabilities into its products, platform and engineering workflows.

Hands-On Backend Engineering

• Remain deeply hands-on in Cocoon's codebase and personally develop production software.
• Enter an established codebase, understand it quickly and determine what should be retained, refactored or replaced.
• Help shape product ideas and requirements alongside Cocoon team members before specifications are finalized.

Data Architecture

• Lead evolution of Cocoon's existing data architecture into a sophisticated relational domain model.
• Define schemas, relationships, data-access patterns and integrity standards.
• Develop safe migration strategies for evolving an active production database.
• Account for both structured and unstructured information as Cocoon's AI capabilities expand.
• Build a data foundation capable of supporting substantially greater intelligence, automation and scale over time.

AI-Native Engineering & Environment

• Be AI-native in how you work, actively using AI development tools to improve engineering speed and quality.
• Identify and develop AI-native capabilities that add meaningful value to Cocoon’s platform capabilities and user experiences.

Infrastructure & DevOps Oversight

• Ensure infrastructure decisions remain aligned with Cocoon's application architecture.
• Maintain appropriate visibility into security, reliability, deployment architecture, performance & cost.
• Provide technical direction and oversight to Cocoon's outsourced AWS/DevOps engineer.

Enterprise & Partner Technical Leadership

• As required, represent Cocoon in technical discussions with insurance carriers, technology partners and other external stakeholders.

What We Are Looking For

Exceptional Backend Engineering & Architectural Judgment: 8+ years of professional, including backend, engineering experience at a Senior/Staff/Principal/Architect level, with exceptional hands-on development capability and significant production Java experience. Experience with Spring Boot, Spring Security and Hibernate/JPA strongly preferred.

Deep Relational Data Architecture Expertise: Proven ownership of complex production relational data models at real scale. Strong PostgreSQL experience (Cocoon currently uses Aurora PostgreSQL).

Strong System Design & API Architecture Capability: Demonstrated ability to design sophisticated production systems and REST APIs, understand distributed-system tradeoffs, with real experience improving an already-established codebase, not only building greenfield.

AI-Native Engineering Capability: Demonstrated ability to use modern AI-assisted development tools to materially improve engineering productivity and quality, while applying the technical judgment needed to critically evaluate AI-generated work.

Production Applied-AI Experience (Highly Preferred): Meaningful hands-on experience implementing and operating production AI solutions, including agentic capabilities, working with multimodal approaches, or in particular computer-vision capabilities, including architecture, evaluation, retrieval, reliability, and production operations.

Strong Cloud & Production Infrastructure Fluency: Experience with AWS-hosted production systems (EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, IAM, VPC networking), containers, CI/CD and modern cloud deployment architecture.

Production Engineering Discipline: Strong understanding of application security, automated testing, observability, reliability, performance and maintainability. Builds systems designed to operate reliably in production, not simply function in development.

Technical Leadership & Independent Judgment: Experience directing senior engineers and serving as a trusted technical authority. Comfortable making consequential decisions with incomplete information, surfacing risks early, challenging assumptions, and recommending a clear path forward.

How You Work

Owner's Mindset, Professional Maturity & Communication: Operates like an owner, not a ticket-taker. Takes responsibility for outcomes, moves quickly without sacrificing quality, disagrees productively, communicates clearly, and credibly represents Cocoon with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Genuine Engineering Craft: Still loves building software and is comfortable operating without a large engineering organization around them.

Thrives in a Startup Environment: Acts independently while collaborating effectively within a small team. Knows how to get things done and works quickly without requiring a high degree of oversight.

Why Join Cocoon

• Meaningful equity options and participation in the company's long-term success
• Direct working relationship with Cocoon's Founder & CEO
• Genuine ownership of Cocoon's technical architecture and engineering direction
• Opportunity to remain deeply hands-on while operating at the highest technical level in the company
• Small, senior team with substantial individual autonomy and impact
• Fully remote working environment
• Opportunity to shape Cocoon's products and engineering organization with AI

Apply Now

About the company

Cocoon

Actively Hiring

AI-Driven Property Intelligence and Service Fulfillment New York City

1-10

Home Services

Real Estate

Insurance

Customer Service

Property Management

Home Automation

Maintenance

Property And Casualty Insurance Companies

Learn more about Cocoon

Founders

Brandon Day Founder