[Hiring] Principal Engineer @IPS Group Inc.

Role Description

The Principal Engineer is the technical owner of the platform behind Populus.ai and Elevate, combining two roles in one: the platform's architect and its lead hands-on developer. You will set the architecture, write production code every week, and lead a small distributed team of offshore engineers and external development partners.

Expect roughly 60—70% hands-on development and 30—40% architecture and technical leadership. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a people-management role: you lead through design, code review and example. As the team grows, this role is expected to evolve into engineering leadership for the Populus.ai and Elevate platform.

This is a "do it all" position. On any given day you might:

• Build a new ETL pipeline and the product around it.
• Design an API for a data product.
• Trace why a metric looks wrong.
• Fix a broken integration.
• Update infrastructure as code as the GCP environment evolves.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a principal, staff or lead role owning system architecture.
• Still hands-on: writing production code as a core part of your job within the last 2—3 years.
• Expert Python, including FastAPI (routers, middleware, dependency injection), SQLAlchemy and Pandas.
• Strong PostgreSQL and analytical SQL; working experience with PostGIS and geospatial data.
• Production front-end experience with TypeScript and React, including map-based interfaces (Mapbox GL JS or similar).
• Production experience on Google Cloud Platform: Cloud SQL, IAM and service accounts, Secret Manager, Cloud Storage, monitoring and logging.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Building and operating ETL pipelines with Apache Airflow or a similar orchestrator.
• Docker and CI/CD with GitHub.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor or GitHub Copilot, in day-to-day development, with sound judgment in reviewing and verifying AI-generated code.
• Track record of debugging complex data issues end to end, from a wrong number on a dashboard to its root cause.
• Experience leading and mentoring distributed or offshore engineers across time zones.

Requirements

• Experience with CDK for Terraform.
• Hands-on experience with front-end libraries: Material UI (MUI X data grid and charts), TanStack Query, react-map-gl, Turf.js and Plotly.
• Experience establishing AI-assisted development practices for a team, such as repository guidance files (e.g., CLAUDE.md), AI-assisted code review, and quality standards for AI-generated code.
• Experience integrating AI or LLM features into production applications.
• Background in parking, micromobility, transportation or smart-city data.
• Experience with BigQuery or other cloud data warehouses.
• Experience operating SaaS platforms in a PCI DSS or SOC 2 environment.
• Startup or small-team experience where you owned the whole stack.

Benefits

• 401 (k)
• 401 (k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Company Description

IPS Group, Inc. is a San Diego-based parking technology company, Level 1 PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type II compliant, whose smart meters, software and mobile products serve cities across North America, the UK and Ireland.

IPS Group offers one mobility data platform under two brands: Populus.ai, a stand-alone product for the micromobility market, and Elevate, the same application branded for IPS Group customers. It gives cities one place to manage parking, the curb and shared mobility: parking revenue, occupancy, enforcement, parking sessions, pricing and geographies. The platform runs on Google Cloud and is built in Python on PostgreSQL/PostGIS.