Sr. Principal Engineer

Sr. Principal Engineer### Sr. Principal Engineer Apply:
District of Columbia:
Full time:
Posted Today:
JR101449
** About The Opportunity
** We're looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to help stand up this team from its earliest days and bring AI-enabled development practices to Wonder Engineering. You'll design and build solutions to solve context fragmentation, MCPs/CLIs, skills, sub-agents, and integrations that connect AI tooling to Wonder's codebases and systems, and the AI-assisted workflows — code generation, review, testing, documentation, refactoring, on-call/incident management — that engineers use every day.

We’re looking for someone who brings proven AI-tooling developer patterns and practices from outside Wonder that we haven't yet discovered internally. You'll partner closely with the team's other engineers across the company, each of whom owns a distinct part of the developer-experience surface area, and with the platform, infrastructure, and application teams whose workflows you're improving.
** The Impact You Will Make
*** Build AI-Native Developer Tooling:
Design and ship Context aggregation solutions, MCPs/CLIs, skills, and sub-agents that give AI coding tools sanctioned, reliable access to Wonder's codebases, services, and systems. Help define and stand up Wonder's autonomous development agents and cloud agent solutions.
* Bring Outside Patterns In:
Bring a sharp point of view on where AI-assisted development actually creates leverage across review, testing, code generation, and documentation, and translate the best emerging practices into standards that fit Wonder's stack, scale, and constraints.
* Raise the Ceiling on Review:
Contribute to pre-review and triage tooling that clears and automates mechanical and policy issues before a human looks, and help define standards for reviewing AI-generated code.
* Instrument for Efficiency, Not Just Adoption:
Design and implement the systems that optimize AI costs across the org and abstract model selection away from engineers' day to day, so the platform routes each task to the right model at the right cost without every engineer having to reason about it. Help define and measure Developer velocity.
* Guide Technical Outcomes:
Scope, design, and ship developer tooling with minimal oversight, weighing tradeoffs and partnering with platform, infrastructure, and application teams to land it in production.
* Communicate Effectively:
Write clear specs and documentation, and provide, seek, and incorporate feedback from a team and organization still defining its own practices.
** What You Bring to the Table
*** Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
* 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including recent, hands-on work building with or on top of LLM-based tooling (agents, MCP servers, coding assistants, or similar).
* Direct experience integrating AI tools into real development workflows — code review, testing, code generation, or documentation — beyond individual use as an end user.
* Strong system design skills and a track record of owning tools or platforms end-to-end, from design through adoption.
* Comfort operating with ambiguity: this is a new team without established playbooks, and you'll be shaping them.
* Experience designing and consuming APIs, webhooks, or other integration/message-based systems.
* Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, CI/CD systems, or other software used by engineers as its primary users.
* Experience with Java/JVM and/or Python is a plus, though not required.
* A pragmatic approach to problem solving and the ability to troubleshoot complex technical obstacles.
* Excellent communication and interpersonal…