Principal Software Engineer,Systems Job Hartford area,Connecticut USA,Software Development

Summary

Meta is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to build the next generation of AI systems for production reliability. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, incident response, and applied AI. You will lead the development of an AI agent that can autonomously investigate production incidents, identify likely root causes, create safe mitigation plans, and execute them while humans supervise and can intervene.

You will improve the agent's accuracy, autonomy, and real-world impact, while identifying other opportunities to apply agentic systems across incident prevention, detection, mitigation, observability, and infrastructure operations. This may include improving the agent's architecture, context, and tooling, or adapting foundation models through fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, distillation, pruning, and inference optimization.

This is an applied engineering role, not a research position. The ideal candidate combines deep infrastructure expertise with sound judgment about when and how to apply AI to production problems, a long-term technical vision, and the ability to move quickly from an ambitious idea to a production system operating safely at Meta scale.

This is also a deeply hands-on senior IC role. You will personally prototype, build, evaluate, and ship AI systems, working directly in the code and with production data. A central challenge is creating systems that improve from experience: learning from outcomes, identifying their own failure modes, testing changes, and safely increasing their effectiveness over time.

Required Skills

Principal Software Engineer, Systems Responsibilities:

Define the technical vision and architecture for agentic reliability systems across Meta

Personally design, code, and ship production agentic systems for complex infrastructure problems

Lead the development of an AI agent for production incident investigation and mitigation, advancing it toward accurate, trusted, and safely supervised autonomous action

Develop major improvements in agent reasoning, context, tool use, planning, evaluation, learning, and safe execution

Explore and apply techniques including automated hill climbing, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, model routing, distillation, pruning, and inference optimization, selecting the simplest approach that produces measurable gains

Identify new high-value applications of AI across incident prevention, detection, mitigation, observability, and infrastructure operations

Move rapidly from ambiguous problems to prototypes, validate them against real production workloads, and develop successful approaches into reliable systems at scale

Build evaluation and experimentation systems that connect agent quality to outcomes such as investigation accuracy, successful mitigation, incident duration, and reduced operational work

Build closed-loop improvement systems that turn production outcomes into evaluations, experiments, and better agent behavior

Establish architectures and guardrails for production actions, including authorization, independent validation, auditability, rollback, and human oversight

Partner with Infrastructure, AI, Product, and Reliability leaders to integrate agentic capabilities into Meta’s production ecosystem

Influence technical strategy across organizations and mentor other engineers working on distributed systems and applied AI

Minimum Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience

12+ years of software engineering experience, including experience building and operating large-scale distributed or infrastructure systems

Experience setting technical direction and leading complex,…