Principal Engineer, Populus.ai and Elevate Platform

About IPS Group. Populus.ai and Elevate IPS

IPS Group, Inc. is a San Diego-based parking technology company, Level 1 PCl DSS and SOC 2 Type II compliant, whose smart meters, software and mobile products serve cities across North America, the UK
and Ireland.

IPS Group offers one mobility data platform under two brands: Populus.ai, a stand-alone product for the micromobility market, and Elevate, the same application branded for IPS Group customers. It gives cities one place to manage parking, the curb and shared mobility: parking revenue, occupancy, enforcement, parking sessions, pricing and geographies. The platform runs on Google Cloud and is built
in Python on PostgreSQWPostGIS.

Job Description:
The Principal Engineer is the technical owner of the platform behind Populus.ai and Elevate, combining two roles in one: the platform's architect and its lead hands-on developer. You will set the architecture,
write production code every week, and lead a small distributed team of offshore engineers and external development partners.
Expect roughly 60—70% hands-on development and 30—400/0 architecture and technical leadership. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a people-management role: you lead through design, code
review and example. As the team grows, this role is expected to evolve into engineering leadership for the Populus.ai and Elevate platform.
This is a "do it all" position. On any given day you might build a new ETL pipeline and the product around it, design an API for a data product, trace why a metric looks wrong, fix a broken integration, or
update infrastructure as code as the GCP environment evolves.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Architecture
Own the end-to-end architecture of the platform, across both the Populus.ai and Elevate brands:

FastAPl services, the PostgreSQL/PostGlS data model, Airflow data pipelines and GCP infrastructure.

Make and document key technical decisions.

Set engineering standards for code quality, code review, testing, security' and data quality.

Own the design and enforcement of secure, region-scoped data access so customers only ever see their own data.

Review and approve work from external development partners at defined checkpoints, including AI and LLM features built into the platform.

Partner with Product Management on feasibility, scoping, estimates and metric definitions for the roadmap.

Own GCP reliability, security posture and cloud cost.

Hands-on development

Build new data products end to end: ETL pipelines, backend APIs and supporting front-end changes.

Investigate and resolve data questions ("why does this number look like this?") by tracing metrics through SQL, pipelines and code.

Build new third-party data integrations and troubleshoot breakages in existing ones.

Maintain infrastructure as code and keep Python dependencies and libraries current.

Serve as the senior escalation point for production incidents.

Technical leadership

Lead the offshore engineering team: work planning, design oversight, code review and mentoring.

Keep platform documentation, runbooks and architecture records current.
Represent Populus.ai and Elevate engineering with IPS engineering leadership and, when needed, with customers.

Help grow the team, both onshore and offshore: define roles and skill needs, interview and assess candidates, and onboard new engineers onto the platform

Qualifications and Skills:
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a principal, staff or lead role owning system architecture.

Still hands-on: writing production code as a core part of your job within the last 2—3 years.

Expert Python, including FastAPI (routers, middleware, dependency injection), SQLAlchemy and Pandas.

Strong PostgreSQL and analytical SQL; working experience with PostGlS and geospatial data.

Production front-end experience with TypeScript and React, including map-based interfaces (Mapbox GL JS or similar).

Production experience on Google Cloud Platform: Cloud SQL, IAM and service accounts, Secret Manager, Cloud Storage, monitoring and logging.

Infrastructure as code with Terraform.

Building and operating ETL pipelines with Apache Airflow Or a similar orchestrator.

Docker and CVCD with GitHub.

Hands-on experience using AI coding agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor Or GitHub Copilot, in day-to-day development, with sound judgment in reviewing and verifying Al-generated code. 

Track record of debugging complex data issues end to end, from a wrong number on a dashboard to its root cause.

Experience leading and mentoring distributed Or offshore engineers across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications and Skills:
Experience with CDK for Terraform

Hands-on experience with our front-end libraries: Material UI (MUI X data grid and charts),

TanStack Query, react-map-gl, Turf.js and Plotly.

Experience establishing Al-assisted development practices for a team, such as repository

guidance files (e.g., CLAUDE.md), AI-assisted code review, and quality standards for AI-generated code.

Experience integrating AI or LLM features into production applications.

Background in parking, micromobility, transportation Or smart-city data.
Experience with BigQuery or Other cloud data warehouses.

Experience operating SaaS platforms in a PCl DSS Or SOC 2 environment.

Startup or small-team experience where you owned the whole stack

Technology environment

Technologies
Python, FastAPI, SQ[Älchemy, Pandas
TypeScript, React, Vite, Material UI (MUI
X), TanStack Query, React Router
Mapbox GL JS, react-map-gl, Mapbox Draw
and Geocoder, Turf.js
MUI X Charts, Plotly, D3
PostgreSQL, PostGIS (Cloud SQL)
Apache Airflow
Google Cloud Platform, Firebase
CDK for Terraform
Vilest, Cypress, Testing Library
Sentry
Docker, GitHub
Cloudflare

Education/Experienee:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience

Physical Demands. Equipment. and Machinery:
The physical demands described here are representative Of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to
enable individuals with qualified disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Sitting, standing, walking, lifting, and storing supplies and materials throughout the day. Performing work on a desktop computer requires manual dexterity to operate keyboards, calculators and photocopying machine.

Work Environment:
The work environment described here is representative Of those that an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualified disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Note: The above statements are not intended to be an exhaustive list Of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of personnel in this classification. Nothing in the job description restricts IPS Group from the right to change, assign, or reassign duties and responsibilities at any time for any reason. Furthermore, they do not establish a contract for employment as this is an "AT-Will" employer. It is the policy of IPS Group not to discriminate against any applicant for employment, or any employee because Of age, color,
sex, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, Or veteran status.

401 (k)
401 (k) matching
Dental insurance
Health insurance
Life insurance
Paid time Off
Vision insurance

Job Type: Full-time
Salary range: $125k - $160k/yr.
Works with: An offshore Session Manager engineer, plus QA, DevOps, Embedded Firmware and Product Management.
On-call: Participates in escalation for Session Manager production incidents.

An Equal Opportunity Employer—M/F/D/V