Staff Software Engineer

The Opportunity

Cordova is seeking a visionary AI-native Principal Engineer who masters the balance between architectural strategy and hands-on execution. This isnt a role for a planner who has stepped away from the keyboard; it is for an engineer whose strategic instincts are sharpened by staying in the work.

At this level you arent just following a roadmapyou are helping to draw it. You are the person the team turns to when the stakes are high and the path forward is ambiguous. You are expected to be fully AI-native utilizing agents and AI tooling as your primary means of exploring designing and building. You bring structure to chaos and move the team forward with conviction and technical excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & AI Governance

• Hands-on Ownership: Take direct accountability for the most complex code and critical technical work. You lead from the IDE not just the whiteboard.

• AI-Native Operations: Set the standard for how AI agents and tools are used and governed across the division. You lead through practice demonstrating how AI enhances exploration debugging and architecture.

• Future-Proofing: Contribute to the long-term direction of the platform specifically focusing on serverless architecture event-driven systems and deep AI integration.

Solution Design & Strategy

• Architectural Excellence: Lead solution design for cross-cutting systems ensuring every decision reflects a balance of technical purity and commercial reality.

• Proactive Problem Solving: Identify expensive technical hurdles before they manifest driving the alignment needed to resolve them with efficiency.

• Business Connectivity: Frame technical strategy in terms of business outcomes ensuring technology serves as a direct driver of company goals.

Mentorship & Influence

• Organic Development: Elevate the engineers around you through the quality of your presence in design conversations code reviews and direct collaboration.

• Clarity Building: Move projects forward without waiting for consensus; build clarity through action and bring the team along with you.

The Ideal Candidate

Technical Environment & Stack

• Modern Stack: Proficiency in TypeScript/ and React.

• AWS Cloud: Deep experience with Serverless and Event-Driven patterns (Lambda RDS SQS/SNS S3 API Gateway EventBridge).

• AI Tooling: Mastery of AI agents and development tools as a core part of the daily workflow.

Who You Are

• Judgment Over Checklists: You have spent enough time in the stack to know that judgmentknowing which problems matter and how to frame themis the most important skill.

• Critical AI Criticality: You hold an uncompromising bar for the code you ship critically evaluating AI-generated output with the same rigor as your own.

• Bias for Action: You dont wait for permission or perfect information. You find the problems and build the path forward.

• Fundamental Depth: Whether your experience is in this specific stack or another you have the deep engineering fundamentals to translate your skills into any environment.

Required Experience:

Staff IC