Principal Software Engineer

About the role

Arboreal Management is a property management firm with ambitions to remake the industry. In four years, we've grown to managing over 9,000 homes, doubling each year. Our industry is slow-moving and technologically backwards, and we see an enormous opportunity to do things differently. We combine genuine care for our residents and clients with a willingness to build and deploy new technology quickly.

Over the last several years, we've built our own software platform, Maynard, which now touches leasing, property operations, communications, maintenance, document processing, reporting, and other core workflows. We're increasingly building systems that span all business domains and incorporate the latest AI-enabled workflows. You will work directly with our CEO, who has a computer science background and is deeply involved in designing and building Maynard.

We have a high-level vision and roadmap for Maynard. Your job is to take that vision and turn it into excellent production software. You will be the technical owner for our hardest and most consequential engineering work, such as Maynard Treasury—a new system to control and account for the movement of money across thousands of residents, over 100 properties, and hundreds of bank accounts. These systems require thoughtful architecture, security boundaries, auditability, reliability, and careful handling of failure cases.

Responsibilities

• Design and build major parts of Maynard
• Own architecture for technically difficult or high-risk systems
• Turn rough product concepts and prototypes into reliable production software
• Make pragmatic decisions about where we need engineering rigor and where we should move fast
• Establish sensible standards around testing, deployment, observability, security, and reliability
• Review and improve existing systems as Maynard grows
• Work closely with our Product Engineer to incorporate feedback from ~200 internal users
• Use modern AI development tools aggressively to increase engineering velocity
• Continue writing a lot of code

Requirements

• You are an excellent software engineer who wants substantially more ownership than you have today
• You have built and operated real production systems and have strong opinions about what makes software reliable, maintainable, and understandable
• You are comfortable working across the stack—our problems don’t fit neatly into frontend, backend, infrastructure, data, or AI boxes
• You are excited about working directly with a highly involved CEO, receiving rapid context, ideas, prototypes, and opinions
• You are comfortable taking an idea and running with it, pushing back when necessary, and owning the quality of what we put into production
• You have strong opinions, low ego, and a bias toward building
• You already use AI extensively in your own development workflow and are excited about leveraging it to build systems that would traditionally require a much larger team

Skills

Our current stack includes JavaScript/Node.js, SvelteKit, Postgres, Azure, Cloudflare, and a growing collection of AI models and services. We integrate heavily with third-party APIs and are steadily replacing legacy SaaS software with systems we control. Experience with our exact stack is not required—strong engineers learn tools.

Why this might be interesting

• Unusual engineering job with direct impact—no waiting six months for permission to change a service
• Direct access to business leaders and the ability to ship software that changes how hundreds of employees and thousands of apartments operate
• We’re a real operating company, not a software startup searching for a business model—problems are concrete, users are nearby, and impact is immediate
• Enormous scope for the right engineer

Location: Seattle. We strongly prefer someone who can work with us in person regularly.