Principal Engineer

ABOUT LTV.AI

We're building retention marketing's first AI workforce. LTV.ai is the autonomous marketing platform for ecommerce: AI agents find revenue opportunities, build the campaigns, and run them once the brand approves. Brands across apparel, beauty, furniture, gaming, hotels and more use us for email, deliverability and 1:1 AI conversations.

We think the next leap in retention marketing won't come from better schedulers or bigger template libraries. It will come from a platform that thinks. Our founding team is operators, engineers and former retention leads, backed by funds and operators who have built or bought from ecommerce brands.

THE ROLE

We're hiring a Principal Software Engineer to join our lean, hands-on engineering team. You'll report to the CTO and build alongside the other engineers every day. There are no silos here: one week you might be scaling how we send email, the next you're shipping a new AI agent or tightening how we measure results. We'll match the level to your experience.

• Fully remote, working on Eastern Time (EST) hours
• Reports to the CTO
• Compensation: $235k to $285k base salary plus equity, depending on level and experience

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design, build and run systems that send high volumes of email for many brands, reliably and on time.
• Ship the AI agents that plan, create and run campaigns, from first prototype to production.
• Own what you build from first commit to long after launch, including keeping it healthy in production.
• Turn fuzzy problems into small, shippable steps, then build to learn what's next.
• Work with teammates outside engineering and with brands to understand what they need, and explain technical trade-offs in plain terms.
• Raise the bar for the team: review code, share what you know, and pick up the unglamorous work that helps everyone move faster.

ENGINEERING AT LTV.AI

We're a small team taking on hard problems where AI meets high-volume personalized email, and we're in it for the long haul. We're looking for engineers who:

• See the success of the team as their success
• Have built distributed systems that handle high throughput, partial failure, retries and recovery, and know where they tend to break
• Leave code and systems better than they found them
• Seek out trade-offs, not shortcuts, and turn disagreements into assumptions they can test
• Break big problems into clear steps and pick the right-sized solution, not the most elaborate one
• Explain technical ideas clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike
• Enjoy deep technical discussions with other low-ego engineers
• Want to keep growing while helping others level up
• Are curious about the domain and the problem, not just the code

AI-assisted, human-owned. Here at LTV we're building for the long term delivery of customer value. We take advantage of the latest AI engineering tools but we don't delegate responsibility to them. Expect to design the solutions, understand the code, and own the results. We're building a world-class team that operates at a sustainable pace, not just sprinting to get out the next feature.

NICE TO HAVE

• Worked at a startup and like the pace and breadth that come with it.
• Experience in email or marketing tech, such as deliverability, sending infrastructure or campaign tooling.
• Deep knowledge of e-commerce. Experience with Shopify is an extra plus
• Comfort developing data pipelines & using ML

OUR STACK

We build primarily with TypeScript, Docker and AWS, & Mastra for our agentic flows.

Interested in LTV.ai but worried your experience doesn't line up exactly? We've seen success with engineers from any modern stack who are open to learning. We'd love to hear from you.

To all recruitment agencies: we do not accept unsolicited agency resumes and are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.