The business card
My LinkedIn says Principal Software Engineer. My actual team is four people. On the web-dev side, there are two of us.
Anyone who has worked at a FAANG-shaped org is going to read “Principal” and assume something very specific — ten-plus years in, owns a platform, mentors a fleet of seniors. That is not what the title means at PatentAssist.ai. And yet, eighteen months in, I don’t think it’s wrong either.
This post is about what the title actually bought us, what it cost, and why I’d make the same call again — with one caveat.
The shape of the team
Four people, three role shapes:
- A founder who holds the domain (patents, prosecution workflow, what customers actually want).
- A domain expert who translates between patent-attorney-brain and product-brain.
- Two developers on the web side. Me, and [NAME/ROLE — your co-dev, add a sentence].
That’s the whole company. No designer, no PM, no ops. We have a shared Notion, a Linear board that’s more aspiration than backlog, and a Slack that’s mostly screenshots.
In this shape, “Principal” isn’t a seniority bump over “Senior”. It’s a role description: the person who owns the web stack end-to-end — architecture, production, auth, deploys, incident response, and all the dusty little decisions (which ORM, which hosting tier, what happens when a customer can’t log in on a Sunday).
What the title actually did
Three things, in descending order of usefulness.
1. It gave me permission to make calls
The part nobody talks about with startup titles: they’re mostly a message to yourself. When I’m the “Senior Frontend Dev”, I defer. When I’m the “Principal Software Engineer”, I don’t — because if I don’t make the call, nobody does.
The first six months, this was uncomfortable. Someone has to decide whether to pay for Vercel Pro or run our own infra. Someone has to decide whether tests are a priority this quarter. Someone has to decide whether that customer-reported bug is a hotfix or a Jira ticket. At four people, that someone is me. The title made that obvious to me, which turned out to be the point.
2. It set expectations with customers and partners
Law firms don’t care about titles for the most part, but the rare times they do — procurement, vendor security reviews, “who owns your tech stack” questionnaires — having a named “Principal Engineer” made the answer crisp. Not critical, but genuinely useful once or twice.
3. It was a signal to future me
This is the one I’m most ambivalent about. When you put “Principal” on your LinkedIn after two years in industry, some recruiters filter you out (they assume the title is inflated — and fairly so). Others message you because the title matches their req. Net effect: neutral-to-positive, depending on where you’re aiming.
What it cost
- The imposter feeling, for real. The first time I interviewed elsewhere, the interviewer asked what I owned as Principal. The honest answer — “everything web-facing, and also the Heroku bill” — is not what the question was reaching for. I had to re-learn how to describe the job without the title doing the work for me.
- Over-ownership. When you are the only person who knows how the prod DB is backed up, and that fact lives in your head, you’re on call even when nobody’s paging you. I’ve paged myself at 11pm for a cert renewal I remembered about in the shower. That’s a title thing, but it’s also a four-person-team thing.
- Mentorship that isn’t really mentorship. “Principal” implies you’re growing a team. I’m not — there are two of us. [CO-DEV NAME] and I are peers. So the title overstates one of its implied responsibilities.
The caveat I promised
If I could rewind to day one, I’d still take the title. But I’d be less cute about it on my resume. The phrasing that actually works in interviews:
Principal Software Engineer (Self-Employed, ~4-person team) Owned the web stack end-to-end — from [tech] to production incidents. One of two engineers.
The parenthetical does all the work. It signals “small-team scope” without sandbagging your ownership. Nobody is confused. Nobody thinks you were running a Google-scale platform. You get credit for what you actually did.
What I’d tell someone interviewing into a “Principal” at a four-person shop
- Take it seriously. It’s a better signal for you than for anyone else. Live up to it — treat the stack like you own it, because you do.
- Ask what the team shape is on day one. “Principal at a 20-person startup” and “Principal at a 4-person startup” are different jobs. Neither is bad. But one of them means you’re the platform, and the other means you have one.
- Don’t let it make you defensive. The inflation is real; acknowledging it out loud in interviews disarms the criticism. “Yes, it’s a four-person team — here’s what that actually involved” is a much stronger answer than pretending the title carries FAANG weight.
Eighteen months in, I’m still doing it. My inbox says “Principal.” My hands are elbow-deep in a NextJS app trying to figure out why a Tailwind class isn’t applying. That gap between the title and the reality is startup life — at four people, it’s the whole job.
If you’re considering a similar role, or you’re already in one and wondering whether to keep the title — I’m happy to chat. Reach out.