Principal AI Engineer

About this role

# About Us

Hey! We're The HOTH.

Our name stands for Hittem' Over the Head. In other words, to bludgeon with awesomeness.

We're one of the largest search marketing companies in the world, helping thousands of businesses grow through innovative digital marketing products and services.

Our parent company, Next Net, is investing heavily in AI. We're building a next-generation SaaS platform that combines large language models, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and modern engineering practices to help businesses understand and improve their online presence.

This isn't an AI side project.

It's one of the company's highest strategic priorities.

# About the Position

We're looking for a Principal AI Engineer to help build the future of NextNet AI.

This isn't a management role.

You won't spend your days sitting in status meetings or managing people.

This is a role for someone who loves building.

You'll partner directly with our CTO to solve the hardest technical problems across our platform. We're looking for someone who can jump into unfamiliar systems, understand them quickly, and ship production-quality solutions with confidence.

Some days you'll be debugging a frontend issue that turns into a backend API problem.

Other days you'll be optimizing AI pipelines, designing scalable cloud infrastructure, improving distributed services, or shipping entirely new product capabilities.

If you're the engineer people call when nobody else can figure something out, keep reading!

Please note: This is a senior, hands-on engineering position. While you'll partner closely with technical leadership, this role does not include people management responsibilities.

# A Typical Day in the Life

40% Building production-ready features across frontend, backend, AI services, and cloud infrastructure.

20% Diagnosing complex production issues, identifying root causes, and improving platform reliability.

15% Designing scalable arch...