Principal AI Software Engineer

## Principal AI Software Engineer Apply locations:
Austin, Texastime type:
Full time posted on:
Posted Todayjob requisition ###

Key Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Organizational Enablement
* Define and drive the engineering vision across multiple teams, aligning technology direction with company-wide business objectives.
* Mentor and develop Engineers through structured coaching, architectural sponsorship, and deliberate investment in their growth as technical decision makers.
* Shape the engineering culture by establishing shared standards, raising the technical bar in hiring, and influencing how engineering competency is grown across Engineering levels.
* Partner with VPs of Engineering, Product, and other executives to co-create technical strategy, bringing a long horizon, systems-level perspective to roadmap and investment decisions. Architecture, Implementation & Quality
* Define and steward reference architectures, frameworks, and engineering patterns that are adopted org-wide, creating leverage across teams rather than within a single one.
* Lead multi-quarter, high-ambiguity technical initiatives from problem definition through to sustained production impact, operating effectively without a defined playbook.
* Identify and resolve systemic, cross-cutting technical issues that span multiple teams or domains — distinguishing the root cause from the symptom and building durable solutions.
* Establish org-wide standards for AI system quality: testing strategies, evaluation frameworks, safety and reliability patterns, and deployment criteria for LLM-based systems.
* Publish internal frameworks, design patterns, and post-mortems that elevate engineering practice across the organization; contribute externally through writing, speaking, or open-source where appropriate.
* Champion engineering excellence as an organizational force to drive continuous improvement in practices, tooling, and developer experience at scale. ### Required

Skills & Qualifications Technical Expertise
* 6+ years of experience with Python in production environments, with a track record of building systems that have scaled across organizations.
* 3+ years of experience designing, deploying, and operating language model–based solutions at production scale, including demonstrated ownership of LLM system reliability, evaluation, and iteration strategy.
* Deep, hands-on fluency with AI coding assistants (Git Hub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) as a core part of engineering workflow, and a demonstrated ability to shape team-wide adoption and best practices around these tools.
* Recognized expertise in the AI/ML tooling ecosystem — including agentic frameworks, MCP, A2A protocols, and the evolving GenAI infrastructure landscape with a history of translating emerging technology into production grade capabilities.
* Proven ability to build systems that are simultaneously innovative, reliable, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business needs — with the judgment to know when to move fast and when to invest in foundations. Production & Platform Experience
* Mastery of software engineering fundamentals — architecture patterns, CI/CD, testing strategy, observability, and code quality — and a demonstrated record of establishing these standards at the organizational level.
* Expert-level understanding of security, privacy, and compliance requirements in AI-enabled enterprise systems
* Extensive experience with container orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure in production, including ownership of platform-level decisions that affect multiple teams.
* Demonstrated ability to diagnose, communicate, and permanently resolve high-severity production issues involving complex AI systems. Communication & Influence
* Exceptional ability to communicate across the full organizational stack — from detailed technical design with engineers to strategic framing with executives — calibrating depth and abstraction with precision.
* A track record of driving major technical decisions and organizational change through influence rather than authority, including across teams and domains outside your direct scope.
* Ability to synthesize ambiguity into a…