AI-Native Principal Software Engineer
Trengo
Software Engineering, Data Science
Utrecht, Netherlands
Posted on Mar 6, 2025
About Trengo:
Trengo is a fast-growing Series A startup building an AI-powered platform to revolutionize customer success. We're ambitious, forward-thinking, and aggressively integrating AI to automate workflows and deliver predictive insights. This requires evolving our engineering capabilities.
The Opportunity - Lead Engineering Transformation:
We're at a pivotal moment. Our platform serves thousands, but we need to significantly evolve our architecture and practices. Key challenges include incrementally transforming our core monolith towards an event-driven architecture, embedding true engineering agility (outcomes over ceremonies), and deeply integrating advanced AI capabilities and tooling.
We seek a highly motivated and experienced Principal Software Engineer to lead this transformation. You are a deeply skilled technical expert and a pragmatic practitioner of modern software architecture and AI-Assisted Development. You will drive significant change, overcome challenges, and demonstrate hands-on technical leadership.
What You'll Do
- Lead Architectural Evolution: Drive the incremental transformation of our core application monolith, designing and implementing scalable, event-driven solutions.
- Champion Performance: Implement optimization strategies across our systems.
- Drive AI Adoption: Act as the practical expert for AI coding assistants (e.g., Cursor), leading adoption through pairing and guidance. Utilize advanced AI assistance to accelerate development and improve code quality.
- Foster AI Culture: Stay current with AI tools/techniques, experiment, and promote practical AI application within engineering.
- Lead & Collaborate: Work cross-functionally (Product, UX) to shape solutions, drive innovation, mentor engineers, champion quality, and ensure technical work delivers measurable customer value.
What you bring to the table
- Proven Technical Leadership: Extensive experience building complex software systems (ideally PHP or Node.js) and leading technical direction.
- Agile & Outcome-Focused: Demonstrates true engineering agility, focusing on iterative value delivery and outcomes. Mentors others in these practices.
- Expert Architecture & Design Skills: Deep experience designing, building, and evolving distributed, scalable, event-driven systems. Proven ability leading the incremental evolution of monolithic applications.
- Advanced AI/LLM Application:
- Strong grasp of AI/ML/LLMs and practical application.
- Hands-on experience implementing RAG systems.
- Proficiency in Advanced Prompting Techniques.
- Experience or strong interest in Agentic AI.
- Working knowledge of LLMOps principles.
- Familiarity with LangChain/LangSmith (highly desirable).
- AI-Assisted Development Proficiency: Demonstrable experience using AI Coding Assistants (e.g., Cursor, beyond basic Copilot) to significantly enhance development workflows.
- Cloud & Infrastructure Expertise: Comfortable with cloud platforms (AWS preferred), databases (SQL/NoSQL), and messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, etc.).
- Performance Optimization: Track record of resolving performance bottlenecks.
Bonus Points:
- SaaS / Customer Success domain experience.
- Deep experience modernizing large monoliths.
- Open-source contributions (AI/Dev tooling).
- Familiarity with our stack: Laravel, Vue.js, Node.js, MongoDB, MySQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, PlanetScale.
What we offer
- Finding yourself in a fast-growing company where your career can evolve. With the help of your number one supporter, your manager, you will follow our departmental growth tracks to pursue the career you want. This is one of the reasons for our positive Glassdoor reviews (4/5).
- We really value flexibility and trust our people. That’s why we work hybrid, and our people can work from abroad for 60 days per year.
- Free sessions with on-demand psychologists from OpenUp. Your mental health is important to us.
- An education budget to feed your curiosity and 2 extra days off for your courses or conferences, if needed.
- 28 vacation days to rest, have fun, and travel as you wish.
- Internet and phone allowance every month!
- Fancy learning Dutch? We also offer Dutch courses for our international employees!
- When you work from our beautiful office: you can bet we have delicious warm lunches together prepared by our in-house chef and workplace experience team. Also, your traveling expenses to Utrecht will be reimbursed.
Our Engineering Culture
We're building small, empowered teams that leverage AI to solve complex problems efficiently. We value true agility over ceremonies, focusing on outcomes rather than processes. Our engineers continuously learn, experiment, and deliver exceptional results in an environment where senior talent can make a significant impact.