Principal Engineer

Arboreal Management is looking for an exceptional software engineer to become the senior technical builder on a small, unusually ambitious internal software team.

We are a property management firm with ambitions to remake the industry. In four years we have grown to managing over 9,000 homes, doubling each year. Our industry is slow-moving and technologically backwards. We think there is an enormous opportunity to do things differently. We are winning by combining genuine care for our residents and clients with a willingness to build and deploy new technology very quickly.

Over the last several years, we have been building our own software platform, Maynard, to run more and more of the company. It now touches leasing, property operations, communications, maintenance, document processing, reporting, and other core workflows. We are increasingly building systems that touch all business domains and incorporate the latest AI enabled workflows.

We are not trying to be a software company, and we don't plan to build a big engineering organization because that will slow us down. We are looking for someone who is extremely good at building software and excited about having it make an impact in the world, fast.

The role

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.

Sometimes that means taking an idea and running with it. Sometimes it means looking at something we've already built and saying, "This needs to be rebuilt before we depend on it." We want someone with enough technical judgment to know the difference.

You will be the technical owner for our hardest and most consequential engineering work.

One example is Maynard Treasury, a new system we're building to control and account for the movement of money across a company with thousands of residents, more than 100 properties, and hundreds of bank accounts. Systems like this need more than code that works. They need thoughtful architecture, security boundaries, auditability, reliability, and careful handling of failure cases.

What you'll do

• 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 simply 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, who supports our roughly 200 internal users and turns their feedback into product improvements
• Use modern AI development tools aggressively to increase engineering velocity
• Continue writing a lot of code

Who we're looking for

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 developed 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, and neither should you.

You don't need a particular degree or pedigree. We care much more about what you've built and how you think.

You should be excited about working directly with a highly involved CEO. This is important. You'll get a lot of context, ideas, prototypes, and opinions, often quickly. We already have a strong vision for where we want to take Maynard, but we need your technical judgment about how to get there. You need to be comfortable taking an idea and running with it, pushing back when you think we're heading down the wrong technical path, and ultimately owning the quality of what we put into production.

We want someone with strong opinions, low ego, and a bias toward building.

Our technology

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 augmenting and replacing legacy SaaS software with systems we control ourselves.

We know AI is fundamentally changing how software gets built, and we are leaning into that change rather than cautiously experimenting around the edges. You should already be using AI extensively in your own development workflow and be excited about figuring out how a very small engineering team can build and operate systems that previously would have required a much larger organization.

Experience with our exact stack is not required. Strong engineers learn tools.

Why this might be interesting

This is an unusual engineering job.

You won't spend six months getting permission to change a service that does one small thing. You will have direct access to the people running the business and the ability to ship software that changes how hundreds of employees work and how thousands of apartments are operated.

We're a real operating company, not a software startup trying to discover a business model. The problems are concrete, the users sit down the hall, and when you build something good, you'll see it being used almost immediately.

For the right engineer, the scope is enormous.

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

If you're an exceptional builder who wants ownership, speed, and hard real-world problems, we'd like to talk.