Principal Software Engineer

Privacy PolicyJob OpeningsPrincipal Software EngineerProduct Engineering - Claremont, Western Cape (Hybrid)About the Role Kurtosys builds the platform that asset and wealth managers use to produce and distribute client-facing reports, marketing materials, and data-driven documents at scale. We're a regulated fintech -- ISO-27001 certified, operating across four global offices, fully hosted on AWS. The engineering team is small, senior, and moving fast.   This role sits in Product Engineering. You'll own features end-to-end: from understanding the business problem, through architecture and implementation, to deployment and production monitoring. The work spans front-end (React, TypeScript), back-end services (Node.js, serverless), databases (PostgreSQL, SingleStore), and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Cloudflare). You'll work across all of it -- not because we expect you to be an expert in everything on day one, but because we expect you to be capable of working wherever the problem takes you.   What makes this role different from the other senior engineering listings you'll see this week: AI is not a line item on our roadmap. It's how we work. The engineering team uses AI daily -- for architecture, implementation, code review, testing, and delivery. We have AI agents embedded in our workflows, shared prompting standards across the codebase, and an expectation that every engineer uses these tools to move faster and think more clearly.   We're not looking for someone who is "willing to embrace AI." We're looking for someone who already has, and who can show us something we haven't tried yet.   What You'll Actually Do - Solve business problems, not just technical ones. You'll work with product managers and designers to understand what clients need, then figure out the right way to build it. The best engineers here challenge requirements, not just implement them. - Own features from architecture to production. You'll design APIs, model data, build UIs, write tests, deploy, and monitor. You won't hand things off to another team -- you'll see them through. - Ship with AI as your primary tool. You'll use AI coding tools to prototype, iterate, and deliver at a pace that wouldn't be possible without them. You'll also know when AI is wrong and have the judgement to catch it. - Improve how we work, not just what we build. We value engineers who bring ideas about process, tooling, and standards. If you've found a better way to do something, we expect you to advocate for it. - Work in a regulated environment. Our clients are in financial services. That means accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.2 AA), security best practices, data isolation, and audit trails are not optional. You'll need to build with these constraints as defaults, not afterthoughts.   What We're Looking For   Judgement and problem-solving ability. You can break down an ambiguous problem, identify what matters, make a decision, and explain why. You don't wait to be told what to build -- you figure it out and propose a path.   An embedded AI workflow. You don't just "use Copilot sometimes." You have a workflow -- prompting patterns, tool configurations, an understanding of where AI helps and where it hallucinates. You can describe a specific task you completed with AI this month, what went wrong, and how you fixed it.   Specificity over generality. When we ask about your experience, you name the system, the client, the decision, and the trade-off. You don't describe what a good engineer would do in theory -- you tell us what you actually did.   Communication that influences. You can explain a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder. You can write a proposal that gets buy-in. You can disagree with a colleague constructively. In a remote-heavy, async team, this matters as much as code quality.   Full-stack capability. You're comfortable in React and TypeScript on the front end, Node.js on the back end, SQL at the data layer, and AWS for infrastructure. You don't need to...