Principal Engineer, Digital Engineering

PRINCIPAL ENGINEER, DIGITAL ENGINEERING

Thresh Consulting — Strategy in Action for the AI Era

Salary: $220,000–$250,000 + up to 30% performance-based bonus and equity potential

Location: Hybrid with client travel (NYC, Chicago or Denver preferred)

ABOUT THRESH

Thresh Consulting is a modern digital consulting firm built for the AI era—where strategy, execution, and craft come together to deliver real outcomes with speed. Our specialty is helping organizations design, build, and scale digital products that create exceptional customer experiences and drive measurable value.

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Principal Engineer, Digital Engineering is a hands-on technical leader who thrives in the trenches: someone who loves solving complex problems with code, mentoring other engineers, and shipping production-quality work at velocity, across the full stack.

You'll spend 70% of your time building: architecting systems, migrating legacy platforms, and defining the technical standards that elevate the entire team. The other 30%? Leading technical workstreams, unblocking teammates, and partnering directly with client engineering leadership to execute their most critical initiatives.

This role is for an engineer who wants to stay close to the code, work on hard problems, and be the technical go-to for a client engineering leader who has too much on their plate.

We expect you to be an expert in AI-assisted development, specifically Claude Code, Cursor, and modern tooling, capable of scaffolding applications, migrating legacy systems, and moving from design to production code at a pace that redefines what "fast" means.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

AI-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Integrate AI tooling into the development cycle, leading by example to show how tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Antigravity can rapidly build production-quality components, migrate legacy systems, and prototype complex features.
• Apply spec-driven development in practice: writing specs precise enough for an agent to implement against, and verifying the resulting code against the spec rather than the diff.
• Build and apply agentic workflows in production: single-agent loops for well-scoped tasks, multi-agent orchestration graphs when the work needs specialized nodes and shared state, choosing the simplest structure that gets the job done.
• Establish Thresh's development stack and patterns, ensuring the team spends time on innovation and business logic rather than boilerplate.
• Demonstrate what modern engineering velocity looks like, staying up to date on the latest tool launches to ensure Thresh continually sets the standard for best-in-class delivery.

TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE & CUSTOM PROBLEM-SOLVING

• Architect and implement complex, full-stack solutions that balance speed, maintainability, and scalability.
• Solve the hardest technical problems on the engagement: the ones that would otherwise block the team or require escalation to client leadership.
• Move fluidly across the stack: front-end, APIs, data pipelines, and integrations, to unblock your team or deliver end-to-end value.
• Collaborate with designers to understand workflow constraints and translate design intent into elegant, performant code that respects real-world technical limitations.
• Define engineering standards and reusable patterns that elevate quality across the engagement and become assets for future Thresh projects.

ENGINEERING MENTORSHIP & TEAM LEADERSHIP

• Lead and mentor a team of Thresh engineers on client engagements, ensuring they're learning, growing, and delivering at a high standard.
• Conduct architecture reviews and code reviews focused on patterns, logic, and system design.
• Champion continuous learning in a landscape where AI tools advance daily, ensuring the team is always experimenting with new capabilities and staying ahead of the curve.

CLIENT PARTNERSHIP & TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

• Partner directly with client engineering leadership (VPs, Directors, Architects) as a trusted technical peer who can take high-leverage work off their plate and execute with minimal oversight.
• Present technical strategies and architectural decisions to stakeholders with clarity and confidence.
• Operate in a "recommend → approve → execute" model. Shape the vision, seek alignment, deliver with speed and quality.
• Build long-term trust with client teams by consistently shipping excellent work, unblocking bottlenecks, and raising the technical bar.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 10–15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep, full-stack expertise, including modern frameworks and design system implementation.
• Hands-on technical contributor: you still ship features, build components, and write production code. This isn't a purely advisory role.
• Proven ability to architect complex systems under tight timelines, balancing rapid delivery with maintainability, performance, and scalability.
• Experience mentoring and leading engineers, but you're more comfortable in code reviews than performance reviews: you lead through technical excellence, not org charts.
• Comfort with ambiguity and custom problem-solving: you thrive when faced with new challenges and enjoy figuring out novel solutions.
• Genuine full-stack fluency: comfortable moving between front-end, back-end APIs, databases, and infrastructure to unblock the team and deliver end-to-end.
• Intellectual curiosity and bias toward experimentation: you're always exploring new tools, techniques, and ways to deliver value faster.
• Client-facing communication skills: you can explain technical trade-offs clearly to non-engineers and build trust with senior stakeholders.

WHY THRESH

• Competitive compensation with bonus eligibility.
• Healthcare benefits and 401(k) with company match.
• Opportunity to work on modern, high-impact products utilizing cutting-edge AI-assisted development tools.
• Clear growth path and mentorship from senior engineering leaders.
• A culture that values craft, clarity, and teamwork.