Principal Software Engineer – Physical AI, Autonomy & Data Platform Engineering

Career Area: Technology, Digital and Data

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live.

Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy and engineering execution for large-scale data ingestion and processing platforms supporting physical AI and autonomous systems.

This role is responsible for driving engineering excellence across distributed scrum teams while designing scalable, cloud-native solutions for ingesting and processing high-volume sensor and telematics data including LiDAR, radar, video, image, and vehicle telemetry streams. The Principal Software Engineer will partner closely with Principal Data Architects, Product Owners, and Engineering Leadership to define reusable data platform capabilities that support advanced analytics, machine learning, and autonomy initiatives.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role with significant influence on platform architecture, engineering standards, scalability strategy, and long‑term technology direction. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and SDLC discipline with the ability to lead engineering efforts in highly ambiguous and rapidly evolving technical domains.

This role operates at the frontier of physical AI and autonomy engineering, where technologies, architectural patterns, and best practices are continuously evolving. Success in this position requires an engineer who thrives in ambiguity, adapts quickly to emerging technologies, and can drive progress despite incomplete or constantly changing information.

The Principal Software Engineer will serve as a technical anchor and role model for software and data engineering teams, helping establish a culture that embraces experimentation, iterative development, and continuous learning. This individual must be highly effective operating in “the grey” — balancing strategic architectural thinking with pragmatic execution in a frontier engineering environment.

• Lead engineering efforts in emerging domains related to physical AI, autonomy, and next‑generation sensor‑driven systems.
• Operate effectively in environments with evolving requirements, incomplete datasets, and rapidly changing technology landscapes.
• Drive iterative development practices that enable rapid experimentation, feedback loops, and continuous platform evolution.
• Guide engineering teams through technical uncertainty by decomposing ambiguous problems into actionable engineering strategies.
• Foster a culture of innovation, adaptability, resilience, and continuous learning across engineering organizations.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and architectural approaches to support long‑term platform evolution.
• Partner with architects, researchers, and product leaders to translate innovative concepts into scalable production systems.
• Establish engineering patterns that support agility while maintaining scalability, reliability, and long‑term maintainability.

• Design and oversee implementation of scalable ingestion pipelines for LiDAR, radar, video, image, and telematics data.
• Partner with Principal Data Architects to design reusable data products and domain‑oriented data models.
• Architect and optimize Bronze, Silver, and Gold data layer pipelines supporting both streaming and batch processing workloads.
• Ensure data pipelines are performant, fault tolerant, observable, secure, and cost optimized.
• Drive metadata, lineage, governance, and reusable data object standards across the platform.
• Enable downstream analytics, AI/ML, computer vision, and operational use cases through robust…