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Principal Engineer

Vouch · Chicago, IL (Hybrid) · Hybrid

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About Vouch

Vouch is the insurance broker that powers ambition. We’re a tech-enabled insurance advisory and brokerage purpose-built for growing companies in technology, life sciences, and professional services. Backed by Index, Y Combinator and 500 Global.

About the role

Vouch's engineering organization is becoming agent-native: a large and growing share of our production code is written by AI coding agents working inside human-governed guardrails. That moves the hard problems. Writing code got cheap; deciding what to build, keeping the architecture coherent, and proving that what shipped is correct did not. This role owns that layer.

What they're looking for

  • You are at home in more than one language ecosystem — e.g., systems-level work in Rust or a peer language, large-scale strictly-typed TypeScript, etc. — and you know which discipline each one demands
  • Frontier models are daily instruments in how you build, and “the model can probably do this” is a hypothesis you test with an eval, not a hope you ship on
  • You have run infrastructure other people depend on: infrastructure-as-code at organization scale, GitOps, container orchestration, secrets, observability-as-code — and a pager you did not hand back
  • You treat delivery machinery — CI/CD, environments, releases — as a product with users, and you can argue a migration in cost and risk rather than tool preference
  • You reason in writing. ADRs, design docs, review comments — decisions here live in documents, and you make arguments better by writing them down
  • You multiply rather than add. The measure of this seat is what the engineers and agents around you can safely do a quarter after you arrive
More about this role

Vouch's engineering organization is becoming agent-native: a large and growing share of our production code is written by AI coding agents working inside human-governed guardrails. That moves the hard problems. Writing code got cheap; deciding what to build, keeping the architecture coherent, and proving that what shipped is correct did not. This role owns that layer.

This is a principal-level individual contributor seat reporting directly to the CTO, with a mandate that spans our estate: a harness for agent-built software — your first ownership deliverable — production AI doing judgment-heavy insurance work, a backend whose bounded contexts need to become real, and the cloud platform underneath all of it.

We are not going to lay the whole system out in a posting — we would rather keep the details as our edge until you are across the table from us. The short version: we extracted the machinery that let a small team ship roughly 1,100 governed changes in seven weeks at a sub-1% change-failure rate, and we are generalizing it into a platform – leaving open technical questions are the kind this role would actually want to be responsible for answering.

  • Own the platform that governs...

Read the full posting on Vouch's site ↗

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