Principal Engineer

The Role

Planetary is looking for a Principal Engineer to own the technical foundation of our client work. You'll be the person who turns client goals into architecture, makes the stack decisions, scopes and estimates the build, and stays hands-on through implementation. When an engagement needs someone to figure out the hard technical problem and then build the spine of the solution, that's you.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role. It is not a management role. You won't have direct reports and you won't own client relationships, though you'll be in the room for technical conversations and trusted to explain decisions clearly when you are. Your job is the technical work itself and the quality of it across our projects: architecture, code, code review, and the standards that keep the whole practice sharp.

Over time, for the right person, this role can grow into broader technical leadership. But we're hiring first and foremost for depth and craft, not for management experience you already have.

About Planetary

Planetary builds industrial-strength systems for brands that can't afford to fail. Our work spans consumer-facing websites, B2B web applications, and everything in between.

We're a small, senior team. Projects involve close collaboration between strategy, design, and engineering from day one. We move deliberately, communicate directly, and take craft seriously. We started as a remote team and built our culture around that, with flexible hours, autonomy over your time, and a real emphasis on work/life balance.

What You'll Do

Architecture and technical strategy

• Translate client requirements into technical recommendations: architecture, stack decisions, and vendor evaluations
• Define the core architectural patterns for new engagements and set them up so the rest of the team can build against them cleanly
• Scope and estimate engineering work based on proposed solutions
• Evaluate new tools and technologies and make recommendations that are stable, scalable, and consistent with our standards
• Be the person we point at the hardest problems. When something breaks in production, you diagnose it fast and design a sound fix under real pressure, rather than a patch that becomes next quarter's outage

Hands-on build

• Build the foundational and high-risk parts of projects yourself, working across the full project surface when needed
• Stay in the code throughout implementation rather than handing off and stepping away

Technical leadership through craft

• Review code across client projects and give specific, actionable feedback
• Set and maintain engineering best practices, documentation standards, and quality benchmarks
• Help the engineers around you level up on the technical work, by example and through review

What You'll Bring

Required

• 8 or more years of professional engineering experience, with significant time architecting and shipping complex web projects from scratch
• Strong, current expertise with Next.js and the Vercel ecosystem
• Experience working across the full stack and comfort owning the hardest technical problem on a project
• The ability to explain technical decisions clearly, including to people who aren't engineers

Strong fit if you also

• Have worked with a headless CMS in production, Sanity especially
• Have experience in an agency or similarly fast-paced, multi-client environment
• Have a sharp eye for UI detail even though design isn't your primary discipline
• Are actively curious about emerging tools and rigorous about evaluating them before recommending them
• Have a working relationship with AI coding tools and a clear point of view on where they raise the quality bar and where they need to be kept on a short leash

Location: Must be based within the continental United States.

What Success Looks Like

In the first few months, you've gotten oriented across our active client work, formed a clear point of view on what's solid and where the gaps are, and started shaping the architecture on new engagements.

Over time, success looks like client projects built on foundations that hold up, engineers around you producing higher-quality work because of the standards and review you bring, and a Planetary engineering practice with documented technical standards that don't depend on any single person to enforce them.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for full-time employees
• 4 weeks of paid time off per year, plus holidays including 2 weeks at the end of the year
• One-time remote work stipend to set up a comfortable working environment
• Flexible hours and full remote autonomy

To Apply

Send a short email to [email protected] with links to your LinkedIn, GitHub, and any portfolio or examples of past work, plus a couple of sentences on what you'd want to be working on. That's it. If there's a fit, we'll follow up from there.