Principal Engineer, AI: Build Our High-Performance Engineering Team

Build the engineering team behind a global AI product

Coursebox is an AI course creator and learning platform that helps organisations build, manage and deliver online training.

Since launching in 2023, more than 400,000 people have signed up to Coursebox. We now have more than 1,700 active paying customers across 110 countries and many languages, from training businesses through to large corporations. We recently hit $2 million ARR - it's an exciting time to join as we figure out how to take that to $100 million ARR as quickly as possible.

Our ambition is to make Coursebox the world's most popular way to create, manage and deliver online training.

To get there, we need an exceptional engineering team.

Why this role exists

The next stage of Coursebox requires us to level up how we build software.

We want a small, fast, AI-native engineering team with an extremely high talent bar. A team that ships constantly, uses AI aggressively, owns quality end to end and can move at startup speed without creating chaos underneath it.

Think more Linear or PostHog than a traditional engineering organisation.

We're looking for an exceptional hands-on technical leader to help us build that.

You'll shape our architecture, engineering systems, development processes and technical culture. You'll help build the team around you.

But you'll also still write code and ship product every week.

This is not a management-only role.

What you'll do

• Build and ship product yourself every week. You'll be one of our strongest individual contributors, not a manager who only delegates
• Own technical direction. Modernise our architecture and stack so a small engineering team can move incredibly fast without sacrificing reliability
• Build the AI systems behind Coursebox: agentic workflows, retrieval and search, orchestration, evaluation, and the backend powering our AI course designer
• Redesign how we build software. Push AI-assisted development, automated testing, code review, observability, release quality and engineering metrics much further
• Set the engineering bar, and help the engineers around you become even better
• Help build the team. Play a major role in hiring, developing and retaining a small group of outstanding engineers
• Shape the product. Work directly with the founders and product lead on what we build, why we build it and how we make it significantly better

You might be the right person if

• You've operated as a senior or principal engineer, tech lead or hands-on Head of Engineering inside a fast-growing software company
• You've seen a genuinely high-performance engineering team up close and understand what makes one work
• You build with LLMs for real. Agents, evals, RAG, retrieval, orchestration and production AI systems are familiar territory
• You have strong full stack depth across TypeScript, Node.js and a modern frontend stack
• You have strong product instincts. You notice when something is technically sound but still isn't good enough for the user
• You think deeply about developer experience, testing, architecture, deployment and the systems surrounding the code, not just the code itself
• You want to build something ambitious, and you'd rather put that energy into one company than into a side project

What we offer

• Genuine ownership over some of the most important technical decisions in the company
• A direct working relationship with the founders
• The chance to shape the engineering team, architecture and culture while we're early enough for your decisions to have a massive impact
• A company completely committed to AI, both in the product we build and in how we build it
• Options for the right person

How to apply

Apply with your CV and a short note or cover letter telling us why you're interested in this role