Principal Software Engineer

🚀 The Opportunity

Bello is building the future of qualitative research, where real-time conversations, asynchronous tasks, and AI-powered insights come together in one seamless platform. We’re looking for a product-minded Principal Software Engineer to help shape and scale our early-stage SaaS product. You’ll be a senior technical leader, deeply hands-on, driving architecture, code quality, and delivery velocity across our core features: synchronous meetings, NLP transcription, recording analysis, and AI summarization.

You’ll collaborate closely with the executives to turn ideas into elegant, reliable, and secure experiences for our users. This is a rare opportunity to join a fast-moving team with an experienced founder that has already had a successful exit in this vertical.

🛠 What You’ll Do

Design & build core features: Architect and develop across our modern TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire) and SolidJS front end. Build systems for real-time sessions, media pipelines, and AI*-driven analysis.

AI is obligatory these days otherwise no one pays attention. But for real, we do need some LLM-based features in our platform, but it needs to be implemented in a sustainable fashion.

Own technical execution: Lead sprint planning and delivery. Ensure features ship on time, meet performance goals, and scale gracefully. Pull the difficult or uncertain work up front to fail fast. Be quick and vocal about problems that will affect quality or timelines.

Drive code quality & reliability: Review pull requests, uphold best practices, and mentor engineers on maintainable, testable, and performant code.

Collaborate cross-functionally: Translate research and operations needs into practical, incremental software improvements. Run spikes to prove / disprove theories.

Contribute to infrastructure & DevOps: Support our AWS/Laravel Forge setup, monitor uptime and deployment health, and design for resilience under load.

Shape engineering culture: Help recruit, mentor, and retain a high-trust team focused on delivery, reliability, and privacy.

🎯 Qualifications

Experience: 7+ years in software engineering, including 2–3+ years leading or mentoring other engineers.

Laravel expertise: Deep understanding of Laravel and backend design patterns.

Frontend mastery: Strong grasp of modern JavaScript frameworks — ideally Solid, React, or Vue — and proficiency with TailwindCSS.

Real-time & media systems: Practical experience with event-driven architectures.

LLM integration: Hands-on experience with OpenAI APIs or similar LLM-based tools executing as a runtime component.

Product collaboration: Excellent product sense and ability to work closely with design, research, and ops.

🌟 Nice-to-Haves

Experience in qualitative research tech or adjacent industries

Previous startup SaaS experience

Background working with WebRTC vendors or large-scale video applications