Principal AI Developer

Job Description - Principal AI Developer )

We value all of our employees who make our growth and success possible. We are proud to offer industry leading compensation, comprehensive benefits, 401(k) match with additional profit sharing, PTO and abundant career opportunities.

Come join our award winning organization as we fuel the world and each other. This role focuses on delivering production AI solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Energy Transfer is looking for a hands-on AI Developer with strong expertise in Python or .NET, cloud platforms, and modern data tooling to join our multidisciplinary Enterprise AI team. This developer will work alongside AI engineers/developers and business analysts to build, ship, and iterate on real production AI solutions. This role is ideal for someone who owns work end-to-end: prototyping, building, deploying, and refining.

Experience in smaller companies or startups with multi-hat roles and shipping real systems is advantageous.

Technical Environment

• Design, develop, deploy, and maintain AI solutions using Python and/or .NET.
• Build AI agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio or the Semantic Kernel Agent Framework.
• Build and optimize cloud-native applications on Azure.
• Work with large-scale data in Databricks.
• Partner with AI engineers/developers and business analysts to turn ideas and experiments into production systems.
• Apply critical thinking to evaluate model performance, troubleshoot complex issues, and improve system efficiency.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Prototype quickly, test rigorously, and iterate often.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential job duty satisfactorily. The requirements for this position are listed below:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience, with relevant job experience commensurate with the selected job level (see below).
• Professional experience building production systems with Python or .NET (proficiency in both is a strong plus).
• Strong working knowledge of cloud services and architecture patterns — Azure preferred (or equivalent experience in AWS or GCP, with willingness to ramp on Azure).
• Hands-on experience building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Semantic Kernel Agent Framework, or an equivalent agent framework (e.g., Lang Graph, Auto Gen, CrewAI).
• Hands-on experience with at least two of the following:

• Azure AI Search (or equivalent vector/semantic search platform — Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Elasticsearch with vector, AWS Kendra/Open Search)
• Comfort working with SQL and large-scale data platforms (Databricks experience is a plus, but the syntax is approachable if you know SQL).
• Excellent communication and critical-thinking skills.
• Background in a smaller company or startup environment with significant ownership of technical work.

Required experience is commensurate with the selected job level:

• The Senior Specialist level requires a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience and 5-8 years of relevant job related experience.
• The Lead Specialist level requires a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience and 8+ years of relevant job related experience.
• The Principal Specialist level requires a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience and 10+ years of relevant job related experience.

• Proficiency in both Python and .NET.
• Direct hands-on experience with Microsoft Copilot Studio and/or Semantic Kernel specifically.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks specifically.
• Practical ML experience (model training, evaluation, deployment).
• Familiarity with Azure AI Foundry (or equivalent — AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI) and Azure OpenAI (or equivalent managed LLM service) in production.
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar agent-tooling standards.
• Natural Gas Pipeline or Energy Industry work experience is a plus.

• The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee…