Principal Engineer

About us: Hiver is a modern, AI-driven customer service platform used by companies across healthcare, finance, logistics, education, and technology. We help teams deliver fast, human support across email, chat, phone, WhatsApp, and more — without the complexity of legacy helpdesks. We’re a challenger brand in a category dominated by over-engineered tools. We build software that is simple, powerful, and genuinely helpful; and we operate internally with that same philosophy. If you want meaningful ownership, thoughtful teammates, and work that ships, Hiver is a great place to do it Opportunity: This is the senior-most individual contributor role at Hiver and the only one at this level. You will own the technical vision and architecture for both products at Hiver, and you will lead the transformation of Hiver's engineering organization into an AI-native product-building org. Two responsibilities sit at the core: Architecture and technical standards. You will set architecture direction across the entire product portfolio and internal platforms. You will own the long-horizon decisions on system design, data architecture, AI infrastructure, and engineering quality. You will be the technical conscience of R&D, the person who can see two product cycles ahead and pull decisions back to today. AI-native product building. You will drive Hiver's transformation into an AI-native engineering organization. This is not a side project. We believe the companies that win the next decade will be the ones whose engineering orgs absorb AI into how they build, not just what they ship. You will build the internal AI platforms, dev tooling, and engineering practices that make Hiver's product development 10x more AI-leveraged than it is today. You own that mandate end-to-end: platforms, workflows, culture, proof points. You will report to the founders and work closely with the CPO. You will have influence over every team at Hiver. This is a leadership role. What will you do? Set technical direction for both products. Make the architecture calls others will live with for years. Set technical standards across services, platforms, and engineering teams. Raise the bar on system design, code quality, AI integration, and engineering velocity. Conceptualize and build internal AI platforms, eval management, agentic dev tooling, codegen pipelines, AI-assisted QA, retrieval and inference infrastructure. Change the unit economics of building software at Hiver. Operate at the bleeding edge of AI-native product engineering. Stay ahead of what's possible. Bring it back in code and in how we build. Prevent the predictable failure modes of a scaling product org: unmaintainable systems, reliability decay, manual-QA bloat, slow integration of AI primitives into the product. Stay hands-on. The people best positioned to challenge how we build are the ones still building. What are we looking for? 12–14 years of engineering experience, anchored in a strong IC…