Principal Full Stack Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are an established enterprise e-commerce business looking for a Principal Full Stack Engineer to take ownership of our platform architecture, hosting infrastructure, and engineering direction. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can write production code, design systems end-to-end, and operate the underlying cloud infrastructure with confidence.
You will be the sole engineer on the platform initially, reporting directly to the business owner. You will be responsible for the technical health of the platform end-to-end: codebase quality, performance, scalability, security, and the production environment that runs it all. As the business grows, you will help define how the engineering function is built out around you — including hiring decisions and the standards future engineers will work to.


TECH STACK
You will be working primarily with the following technologies. Deep, demonstrable experience across this stack is required — not familiarity, but production-grade fluency.
- Backend: PHP / CodeIgniter
- Frontend: Bootstrap, Node.js
- Database: MySQL
- Hosting: Google Compute Engine (application), Google Cloud SQL (database)
- Web Server: NGINX (configuration, tuning, and troubleshooting)
- Payments: Braintree


WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own the architecture and ongoing evolution of our CodeIgniter-based e-commerce platform.
- Design, build, and maintain features across the full stack — from MySQL schema and CodeIgniter controllers through to Bootstrap-driven UI and Node.js components.
- Configure, secure, and optimize our hosting environment on Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud SQL.
- Write and maintain NGINX configurations: virtual hosts, SSL/TLS, reverse proxying, caching, rate limiting, and performance tuning.
- Diagnose production issues across the full stack — application code, database, web server, and infrastructure.
- Set the engineering standards and conventions that will scale as the team grows around you.
- Partner with leadership on technical roadmap, scaling decisions, and platform investments.
- Make pragmatic build-vs-buy and refactor-vs-rewrite decisions with full ownership of the tradeoffs.


WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

REQUIRED
- 7+ years of professional full-stack engineering experience, with a meaningful portion in PHP / CodeIgniter on production e-commerce or similarly transactional systems.
- Strong MySQL skills — query optimization, indexing strategy, schema design, and replication/backup awareness.
- Production experience with Google Cloud Platform, specifically Compute Engine and Cloud SQL.
- Hands-on NGINX configuration experience — not copy-paste, but the ability to write and reason about configs from scratch.
- Solid Node.js fluency for frontend tooling, backend services, or both.
- Bootstrap proficiency and the ability to deliver clean, responsive, accessible UI without a dedicated designer.
- Payment processor integration experience on production e-commerce systems. Our platform runs on Braintree, so direct Braintree experience is strongly preferred — but solid hands-on experience with a comparable processor (Stripe, Adyen, ---------- , etc.) is acceptable. We expect fluency with tokenization, vaulting, webhooks, refunds/disputes, and PCI-aware integration patterns regardless of the specific provider.
- Demonstrated ability to operate independently and take ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.


NICE TO HAVE
- Experience with high-traffic e-commerce platforms (cart, checkout, inventory, fulfillment).
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and container orchestration.
- Background in technical leadership, hiring, or running an engineering function.
- Security hardening experience for public-facing web applications.


HOW WE EVALUATE CANDIDATES
We are a lean operation and we hire deliberately. This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role with no other engineers to lean on initially, so we are looking for someone who can operate as a complete technical owner from day one. Candidates who progress past the initial conversation will be asked to complete the technical assessment.

The assessment is designed to mirror the actual work of this role: standing up a real environment, configuring real infrastructure, and shipping a working end-to-end deliverable.

We respect your time. The assessment is scoped to a few hours of focused work by an engineer at this level. We do not ask for unpaid feature work or anything that ships into our production codebase.

COMPENSATION
$2,500/month

SCHEDULE
- PH time but very dynamic type of shcedule
- With OT expected
- Mostly On-Call, with work to do every week with full time pay


HOW TO APPLY
If interested, please apply to this position directly or fill out the following form in order for your application to be considered: ----------

Good luck!