[Hiring] Principal Engineer, Applied AI @Hims & Hers

Role Description

AI is disrupting our stack from the inside, and we're looking for a Principal Engineer to architect that transformation from day one. Applied AI is a small, fast-moving team building a fresh take on how patient care should happen, from intake through ongoing care companionship. This role is the productionization counterpart — the person who takes what's working and makes it robust, scalable, and reliable enough to run in production at the core of the patient experience.

You'll be the key architect of the patient-facing experience end-to-end, owning how the services across the stack fit together. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one, and who can balance building for today with architecting for where the product needs to go over the next several years.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Service Architecture: Own the overall architecture for the Applied AI stack — how individual services blend together into a coherent, end-to-end patient-facing experience, from intake through ongoing companion interactions.
• Productionize AI-Driven Experiences: Partner with research-focused teammates who move fast on experimentation, and take their work to production: hardening services for uptime, reliability, and scale.
• Reliability & Operational Excellence: Instill best practices around debugging, observability, and operational readiness. Design for robustness and scalability from day one rather than retrofitting it later.
• Mentorship & Talent Growth: Mentor senior technical leaders, elevating engineering capabilities across the organization. Champion initiatives that foster talent density, engineering rigor, and a culture of continuous learning.
• Ambiguity Navigation & Execution Acceleration: Lead through complexity and ambiguity, clarifying direction where ownership is unclear. Remove organizational blockers, simplify decision-making, and accelerate delivery of strategic initiatives.
• Customer-Centric Engineering: Translate customer needs and product goals into scalable technical solutions. Define principles and patterns that embed customer obsession into our platform’s architecture.
• Sustainability & Scalability: Design systems and team boundaries to support sustainable growth. Drive investment in non-functional priorities (e.g., observability, migrations, reliability) early in the design process.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep architectural expertise and a record of delivering production systems at scale.
• Proven track record of influencing technical strategy and delivering cross-org technical initiatives at the group or organizational level.
• Excellent track record standing up services at scale in production, with a demonstrated ability to think about robustness, scalability, and debuggability from day one.
• Deep experience owning service architecture across a full stack — understanding how services should blend together, not just how to build any one of them well.
• A "productionization" mindset: comfortable being the counterweight to a fast-moving research/experimentation culture, focused on uptime and reliability.
• Hands-on engineering ability; you want to stay close to the code and the architecture, not just the roadmap.
• Some exposure to LLM/AI services — you don't need deep AI expertise, but you should have tested the waters with LLM or AI-powered systems in some capacity.
• Ability to think long-term and build for the future, balancing near-term delivery with durable architecture.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner across research, product, and clinical stakeholders.

Benefits

• We are committed to building a workforce that reflects diverse perspectives and prioritizes ethics, wellness, and a strong sense of belonging.
• Hims considers all qualified applicants for employment, including applicants with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the California Fair Chance Act, and any similar state or local fair chance laws.
• Hims & Hers is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures.