Principal Engineer

About the role

We are driven to do more. More for our customers and the financial professionals who offer our products. If you are driven to do more and love the challenge of pursuing more, Athene is your kind of company. You will find we offer more than the basics to create an inclusive and dynamic work environment at our various locations. Purpose & Impact: Help build Athene’s founding engineering team in Austin and shape technology that transforms how annuity and retirement products are distributed and managed. As Principal Engineer, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for a new platform, starting with the product rules and calculation services that support guarantee decisioning and the interfaces that enable AI systems to use those services safely. You will design and deliver critical software, guide complex engineering decisions and establish practices that help the team build with speed, quality and accountability. With executive sponsorship, Athene’s scale and Apollo’s investment expertise, this is an opportunity to build something consequential while putting innovation, ownership and our BEAM values into practice.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core platform services. Translate business and actuarial requirements into scalable product rules, calculation services and APIs. Partner with Product, Actuarial, Operations and engineering teams to align designs, dependencies and delivery priorities.
• Deliver critical software and guide technical decisions. Build prototypes, define system interfaces and solve complex implementation challenges. Write and review production code, lead design reviews and create clear technical documentation that other engineers and coding agents can use.
• Build controls into the platform. Design for calculation accuracy, auditability, data integrity, security and reliable operations. Develop interfaces that allow AI agents to interact with financial services through appropriate permissions, validation and safeguards.
• Advance development with AI coding agents. Decompose work, coordinate multiple agents and establish testing and review gates for their output. Remain accountable for delivered software and measure improvements in delivery time, quality and engineering effort.
• Establish reliable engineering practices. Strengthen automated testing, CI/CD, observability, release controls and production readiness. Investigate incidents, address underlying causes and improve the systems and practices that prevent recurrence.
• Simplify solutions and develop team capability. Reuse existing capabilities where practical, make sound technical trade-offs and reduce unnecessary complexity. Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews and pairing, helping the team make effective decisions independently.

Requirements

• 6+ years of designing, building and operating production software systems or relevant professional experience, preferred.
• Demonstrated success guiding complex technical designs and delivering software in collaboration with other experienced engineers.
• Demonstrated expertise using multiple AI coding agents to deliver production software, including task decomposition, orchestration, automated validation and review. Ability to explain and substantiate the impact on delivery speed and quality while independently evaluating and troubleshooting generated code.
• Deep hands-on expertise in cloud-native, distributed, API-first systems, with technologies such as Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, event streaming, infrastructure as code and modern CI/CD.
• Experience developing interfaces and controls for AI agents, including tool or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, permissions, safeguards and evaluations.
• Experience with rules engines, calculation or pricing services, or annuity and retirement products is a plus.
• Experience building systems in financial services or another highly regulated environment, with strong attention to accuracy, security, auditability and data integrity.
• Clear written communication, critical thinking, adaptability and the ability to influence and mentor through technical expertise.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Willing to consider candidates at multiple levels based on skills and experience.