Principal Software Engineer (Retail/Partner)

About Us

Our company is on a mission to reduce food waste and make high-quality, affordable food accessible to everyone. Through our innovative app-based marketplace, we connect shoppers with discounted perishable items while helping retailers turn would-be waste into revenue and meaningful environmental impact. We’re growing quickly across North America and partnering with retailers of all sizes to expand our reach.

If you’re passionate about creating real change for people and the planet, we’d love for you to join us. Your work here will directly contribute to a mission that helps families save money, reduces waste, and builds a more sustainable future.

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Partner engineering team, the group that builds and operates the software powering our relationships with retail partners. This is a senior IC role. You will not manage people directly, but you will lead through technical direction, architecture decisions, and cross-functional partnership.

This role is specifically intended for engineers with meaningful grocery, retail, or retail technology experience. Our systems operate within complex enterprise retail environments, and success in this role requires an understanding of retail operations, integrations, store workflows, inventory and pricing systems, and partner constraints.

You are a builder at heart. You are energized by hard problems in the retail and grocery space, comfortable working directly with enterprise partners and internal stakeholders, and know that the best solutions are often the simplest. You think in systems, write production code regularly, and take pride in shipping software that works reliably at scale.

Who You Are

You care deeply about the problem we are solving. Reducing food waste and making groceries more accessible is meaningful work, and you bring a high level of ownership and craftsmanship to everything you build.

You are collaborative, thoughtful, and pragmatic. You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and helping teams move forward. You raise the technical bar around you through strong engineering judgment, clear communication, and mentorship.

You are equally comfortable discussing architecture with engineers, operational workflows with retail partners, and tradeoffs with product and business leaders.

What You Will Do

Own and build partner-facing systems

• Design, build, and operate the core backend services and integrations that power Flashfood's partner platform, from data ingestion pipelines to partner-facing products.
• Ship high-impact features end to end: backend services in Node.js, TypeScript, and where the role calls for it, React-based frontends for partner-facing tooling.
• Take full ownership of the systems you build, including reliability, observability, on-call response, and ongoing improvements.

Drive architecture and technical quality

• Lead architecture discussions for new and evolving systems: APIs, data models, service boundaries, and integration patterns with external retail systems.
• Identify technical debt and complexity that slows the team down, and lead initiatives to address it.
• Set the standard for TypeScript usage, testing, API design, and observability across the pod.

Work closely with partners and internal teams

• Engage directly with enterprise account managers and retail partners to understand their technical environments, integration constraints, and