Principal Engineer - High growth scale up- Stockholm

🚀 Principal Engineer role - High Growth scale-up - Stockholm 🚀 The title can be interchangeable, but what is a given is that this role is the opportunity to be at the tip-of-the spear within one of Stockholm's most exciting and high-impact startups right now! This role is for someone who wants to be at the forefront of technical discovery, AI application, solving complex, unexplored problems, exploring and spearheading new product & engineering initiatives which translate into real-world commercial impact! You won’t be joining to own a particular engineering team or simply deliver against an existing roadmap. You’ll operate across the organisation, working closely with the CTO, head of product, business leadership and an exceptional product-minded engineering org, to identify opportunities, challenge assumptions and figure out what should be built next! What Makes This Role Different ✅

• A newly created, foundational position with significant freedom to shape the role and having a transformative impact on a company already leading the pack in its field
• Operating across the organisation rather than within a single engineering team
• Close partnership with senior technology and product leadership
• Exposure to complex technical, product and commercial challenges
• Significant autonomy to explore, experiment and influence direction
• The opportunity to work on problems where there is no obvious playbook
• A position at the intersection of technology, product, AI and business strategy

Your Mission ✅ Your role will be to find and solve the problems that sit beyond the boundaries of individual teams. You’ll have the agency to:

• Explore complex business and technical challenges
• Identify opportunities where technology can create meaningful new value
• Lead early-stage discovery, experimentation and validation
• Turn promising ideas into prototypes, products or new capabilities
• Challenge existing thinking and introduce new approaches
• Influence technical and product strategy
• Connect engineering capability with wider business opportunities
• Help identify potential new products, markets and revenue streams

The emphasis is on discovery and problem solving rather than execution against a predefined backlog. AI & Emerging Technology ✅ AI will be an important part of the role and our strategy going forward, but this is not simply an AI engineering position. You’ll be expected to understand where AI and emerging technologies can genuinely change how the organisation operates, what it builds and how it creates value. AND, be able to decide when AI isn't the solution! This could include: ✅

• Identifying unconventional opportunities for AI across the business
• Exploring emerging technologies and their practical applications
• Rapidly prototyping new concepts
• Evaluating whether an idea has genuine customer or commercial potential
• Taking successful experiments through to production
• Helping shape the broader technology and AI strategy
• Focusing on measurable outcomes rather than experimentation for its own sake

How You'll Work✅

• You’ll operate with a high degree of autonomy and work horizontally across engineering, product and business functions.
• You should be comfortable moving between high-level business problems and deep technical detail, and knowing when to stay strategic versus when to get hands-on.
• You won't be expected to manage a large team. Instead, your impact will come through the problems you solve, the direction you influence and the leverage you create for others.

The Ideal Profile ✅ You may currently be a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, VP of Technology or another senior technical leadership position, a founder trapped within a slow moving enterprise org, or maybe you've been a founding engineer or CTO within a high growth startup! More important than your current title is that you: ✅

• Have significant experience building software and designing complex systems
• Have operated successfully in high-growth or high-change environments
• Enjoy ambiguity rather than needing a clearly defined scope
• Have experience taking ideas from 0→1
• A track record / examples of taking product/engineering initiatives from idea to launch, getting stakeholder buy in and taking it to production.
• Combine strong technical depth with product and commercial thinking
• Can understand a business problem before jumping to a technical solution
• Have strong architectural judgement and systems thinking
• Are comfortable influencing without formal authority
• Know when to experiment, when to move quickly and when something needs to be built properly
• Are naturally curious about emerging technology and what it could enable

Technology ✅ The existing environment includes:

• Node.js / TypeScript
• AWS
• MongoDB
• Cloud-native architecture
• Modern engineering practices and tooling

The technology stack is not restrictive. You’ll have the freedom to introduce new technologies where they make sense for the problem being solved. What Success Looks Like ✅ Success won't be measured simply by the number of tickets delivered or systems owned. It will look more like:

• Complex problems being turned into clear opportunities
• New ideas moving from discovery → prototype → production
• Technology creating measurable new business or product value
• AI being applied in places where it genuinely changes outcomes
• New product or revenue opportunities being identified and validated
• Senior leadership having a trusted technical partner for difficult, ambiguous problems
• The organisation becoming faster and more capable at exploring what comes next

This is a role for someone who wants to be at the frontier of what the organisation could become, rather than simply maintaining what already exists. Like we mentioned, high ownership, high agency and autonomy, startup ambiguity with an established engineering team and successful product, with a tonne of room to impact! This is a hybrid role, 3 days/week in Stockholm office generally. Unable to assist in Visa sponsorship or extensions at the moment. Compensated with an attractive salary & compensation offering!