[Hiring] Principal Engineer - Supply Chain Planning @Quince

Role Description

Quince is building its own supply chain planning platform from scratch because the model we operate doesn’t fit anything off the shelf. Our supply chain runs factory-direct, at high frequency, with short lead times, across a growing number of vendors, fulfillment centers, and markets worldwide. The planning and forecasting layer that coordinates all of this is being rebuilt, and as Principal Engineer for Supply Chain Planning Tools, you will build it.

This role is about building the production systems that make data science real, specifically the platform infrastructure that takes forecasting models and optimization algorithms from development into the weekly cadence that runs the business. You’ll need to understand the science well enough to partner with the people who do it, translate it into reliable systems, and give operators the controls to work alongside it and override it when needed.

This is a 0-to-1 role. You won’t inherit a system, but a set of business workflows. You’ll design and build one, with a small and highly capable team, starting with demand forecasting and planning infrastructure and expanding into logistics and warehouse optimization.

The platform we'll build is AI-native by design. AI-augmented operator interfaces, LLM-aided observability, agentic workflows over planning data, and AI-assisted incident triage are first-class capabilities on the roadmap, not afterthoughts. The Principal Engineer will set the bar for both — how the team builds with AI, and how AI shows up in what we ship.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned production engineer who has spent meaningful time in the orbit of data science and ML, not as a practitioner, but as the person who makes it work in production. They have built model pipelines, experimentation frameworks, feature infrastructure, and operator tooling that bring algorithmic systems to life at scale. They can walk into a room with supply chain practitioners, understand their problems at a strategic level, and independently determine what to build. They don’t wait for a PM to translate, and they don’t wait for a large team to start executing.

They thrive in environments where strategy, innovation, and decision-making are intentionally distributed, where candor, speed, and data are highly valued, and colleagues at all levels hold each other to unusually high standards on behalf of Quince customers.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with significant time building data-intensive, ML-adjacent, or science platform systems in production.
• Demonstrated 0-to-1 platform ownership, taking a greenfield charter from architecture through production at the pace a fast-growing business demands.
• Strong production ML and AI platform engineering experience: feature pipelines, model serving, experiment frameworks, monitoring, drift detection, and the infrastructure modern AI-driven systems need (vector stores, prompt and trace versioning, LLM evaluation harnesses).
• AI-native engineering practice.
• Science literacy as a collaborator; you understand forecasting and optimization models well enough to build great infrastructure around them and partner with scientists as a technical peer.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across the full stack: data systems, API design, pipeline orchestration, and production operations.
• Strong communication skills, able to work closely with business and product stakeholders to understand requirements, and translate it into an architectural blueprint and roadmap.

Requirements

• Experience in supply chain planning, demand forecasting systems, inventory optimization, or logistics operations is strongly preferred.
• Experience providing technical direction to geographically distributed engineering teams; hands-on ML or data science background is a genuine plus.

Benefits

• Joining Quince means being part of a mission-driven team reshaping retail.
• You will work alongside talented colleagues, tackle meaningful challenges, and contribute to building a more sustainable, accessible future for customers and partners alike.