Principal Software Engineer

What we’re building and why we’re building it. 

Every month, millions of people use America’s Rewards App, earning rewards for buying brands they love, and a whole lot more. Whether shopping in the grocery aisle, grabbing a bite at the drive-through or playing a favorite mobile game, Fetch empowers consumers to live rewarded throughout their day. To date, we’ve delivered more than $1 billion in rewards and earned more than 5 million five-star reviews from happy users. 

It’s not just our users who believe in Fetch: with investments from SoftBank, Univision, and Hamilton Lane, and partnerships ranging from challenger brands to Fortune 500 companies, Fetch is reshaping how brands and consumers connect in the marketplace. When you work at Fetch, you play a vital role in a platform that drives brand loyalty and creates lifelong consumers with the power of Fetch points. User and partner success are at the heart of everything we do, and we extend that same commitment to our employees.

At Fetch, we value curiosity, adaptability, and the confidence to explore new tools, especially AI, to drive smarter, faster work. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be ready to learn quickly and think critically. We welcome learners who move fast, challenge the status quo, and shape what’s next, with us.  Ranked as one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes for two years in a row, Fetch fosters a people-first culture rooted in trust, accountability, and innovation. We encourage our employees to challenge ideas, think bigger, and always bring the fun to Fetch.

Fetch is an equal employment opportunity employer.

Meet Fetch Engineering: 
At Fetch, we are passionate about solving challenging problems and embracing ambiguity. Our engineering philosophy promotes adaptability and innovation over rigid adherence to rules. Our engineers thrive in complex environments, making well-informed decisions even in uncertain situations. We seek out the necessary information and focus on action and impact, while consistently upholding high technical standards. In this role, you will be a technical leader, shaping best practices to build world-class, user-facing technology. You will mentor fellow engineers, fostering technical growth and collaboration within the team. As a hands-on leader, you will actively contribute to the codebase and deliver features alongside your team.

About the Role:

Fetch is entering its AI-first era, and we’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to design, scale, and evolve the intelligent systems that power personalized consumer and advertising experiences for millions of users. 

In this role, you’ll lead the architecture and development of high-performance platforms that unify data, learning, and delivery to power seamless, adaptive, and measurable products. Sitting at the intersection of ad intelligence, data engineering, and system design, you’ll partner closely with product, platform, and data science teams to make Fetch’s experiences smarter, faster, more relevant, and more measurable.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role that bridges deep technical execution with organizational influence. You’ll serve as an architect and thought partner to senior engineering leadership, helping bring advanced AI and ad quality capabilities into production, improving developer velocity, and driving system intelligence and reliability at scale. You’ll shape how Fetch builds software: resilient, observable, high-performing systems that evolve toward IPO readiness while delivering measurable ad and user value.

Fetch is building the connective tissue between consumers and commerce, where data, intelligence, and monetization converge. With 77M+ receipts processed weekly and $150B+ in GMV flowing through our platform, scale is both our challenge and our advantage.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in making Fetch’s systems as intelligent as its products, ensuring our ads platform, data intelligence, and engineering velocity are ready for the next phase of growth and beyond. You will deliver org-wide and company-level impact, shaping the architecture, reliability, and intelligence of Fetch’s Ads platform and influencing technical strategy across multiple engineering collectives.

This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.

Role Responsibilities: 

• Architect for Scale, Intelligence, and Ads Quality: Design high-performance platforms that unify data, learning, and delivery, powering Fetch’s advertising, personalization, and measurement experiences. Build systems that drive relevance, transparency, and measurable quality across millions of interactions.
• Advance Intelligence in Production: Partner with ML and Data Science Teams to operationalize models for ranking, targeting, and feedback optimization, ensuring each system meets clear latency, reliability, and explainability standards. Define the architectural patterns that make Fetch’s intelligence both adaptive and accountable.
• Evolve the Ads Platform: Shape the backbone of Fetch’s ad-serving and quality ecosystem, spanning selection, ranking, attribution accuracy, and fraud prevention. Drive innovation in how Fetch measures and improves ad performance and user experience simultaneously.
• Define System and Experience Quality: Establish company-wide standards for ad and user experience quality, integrating performance, reliability, and relevance metrics. Embed SLOs, guardrails, and feedback loops to ensure our intelligent systems stay safe, measurable, and high-performing.
• Lead Through Influence and Product Partnership: Collaborate across Product, Platform, and Data teams to align technical decisions with business outcomes. Translate tradeoffs into measurable ROI, latency, and quality improvements that drive Fetch’s growth and partner success. Acts as a connective force across platform, product, and AI teams to drive alignment, clarity, and execution on long-term strategic initiatives.
• Accelerate Innovation Velocity: Champion AI-assisted iteration, experiment tooling, and feedback-driven observability to enhance developer and product velocity. Empower teams to move faster without compromising reliability or user trust.
• Mentor and Multiply Impact: Sponsor Senior Engineers and emerging Technical Leads, coaching them to design systems with data-backed decisioning and operational rigor. Scale your impact through mentorship and reusable patterns that elevate the org’s technical bar.

In your Toolbox (Minimum Requirements):

• Proven expertise in data-intensive and intelligent platform design that enables personalization, targeting, or large-scale quality optimization.
• Experience in ad platforms or performance marketing systems, particularly in ranking, targeting, or measurement optimization.
• Experience designing or scaling ad-serving, ranking, or recommendation systems where relevance, latency, and feedback loops are critical to success.
• Strong intuition for data quality, attribution accuracy, and ad performance metrics.
• Track record of leading cross-org technical initiatives that improved reliability, velocity, or experience quality.
• Deep experience bringing ML-driven intelligence into production, including feature pipelines, inference systems, and safety validation.
• Fluency in modern software ecosystems (Kubernetes, CI/CD, event streaming, observability, AI-assisted development workflows).
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical design into business outcomes, influencing senior leadership and product strategy.
• Growth mindset: equally comfortable building and influencing, and relentlessly focused on measurable outcomes.

Preferred Requirements: 

• Familiarity with LLM agent frameworks (LangChain, Semantic Kernel, Haystack) or retrieval-augmented generation architectures.
• Expertise in feedback-based optimization systems, A/B experimentation, or learning-to-rank pipelines.
• Strong intuition for data quality, attribution accuracy, and ad performance metrics.
• Experience improving observability, latency, and cost-efficiency in intelligent or user-facing systems.
• Exposure to multi-modal or contextual intelligence, integrating structured and unstructured data into ranking or decision systems

At Fetch, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure through:

• Equity: We offer employees equity in Fetch, so that everyone can benefit from Fetch’s growth.
• 401k Match: Dollar-for-dollar match up to 4%.
• Benefits for humans and pets: We offer comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans for everyone including your pets.
• Continuing Education: Fetch provides ten thousand per year in education reimbursement.
• Employee Resource Groups: Take part in employee-led groups that are centered around fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace through events, dialogue and advocacy. The ERGs participate in our Inclusion Council with members of executive leadership.
• Paid Time Off: On top of our flexible PTO, Fetch observes 9 paid holidays, including Juneteenth and Indigenous People’s Day, as well as our year-end week-long break. 
• Robust Leave Policies: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, 14 weeks for secondary caregivers, and a flexible return to work schedule. 
• Calvin Care Cash: Employees who are welcoming new family members will also receive a one time $2,000 incentive to assist employees with covering the cost of childcare, clothing, diapers and much more!
• Flexible Work Environment: Collaborate with your team in one of our stunning offices in Madison, Birmingham, or Chicago. Or you can work fully remotely from anywhere in the US. We’ll ensure you are equally equipped with the hardware and software you need to get your job done in the comfort of your home.

Fetch is an equal opportunity employer that embraces diversity, inclusion, and respect for all individuals. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Our commitment to inclusivity ensures that everyone is treated with dignity and has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent, skills, and potential.

Fetch also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities or those with sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. If you need assistance with the application process or require an accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@fetch.com.

Learn more: Fetch Recruitment Scam Warning.