Principal Software Dev Engineer

About the role

You will be responsible for the technical direction of an initiative and the related product surface area, direct tech direction and product direction with/without PM support. You are answerable for what the team delivers, how quickly it adapts, and the business outcomes that result.

What You'll Do

• Guide product concepts through the entire process with agentic AI. Starting from outlining the problem alongside product and business collaborators, moving to prototype development, to a data-informed launch, and then refining based on actual usage data. You are responsible for the full journey, not only a segment of it.
• Build, hands-on with agentic AI. Keep close to the code. Deliver production-quality agent systems, analyses, prompts, and supporting services on your own. Define the reference point through achievements, not words.
• Direct the build process through data-driven insights. Lead product ideas as testable hypotheses. Initiate tracking early and confirm success criteria with or without the PM before beginning coding. Base decisions on actual data concerning what to prioritize, change, or remove. Ensure the feedback loop is as short as feasible.
• Contribute to the department's agentic AI harness engineering alongside peers. Apply, stress-test, and improve shared patterns — LLMs, agents, Skills, MCP, eval frameworks, guardrails — through real production use. Bring back what works and what doesn't from the field.
• Raise the engineering bar on architecture, code review, test strategy, observability, evals, and incident quality. Treat engineering excellence as a baseline expectation, not an optional initiative.
• Lead position, influence people and product decisions. Make your EM and PM more effective at their jobs.
• Contribute to the hiring bar. Lead technical interviews, calibrate the AI-capability signal in our hiring loop, and mentor the next layer of senior and staff engineers.

What You'll Bring

• Direct experience creating agentic AI systems. You have developed, deployed, and improved agentic systems in real-world settings, beyond demos or proofs of concept. You can describe the code you authored, the tests you designed, the prompt and tool usage changes you made, the cost and latency considerations you evaluated, the failure types you managed, and the metrics you used to choose the next release. Interviews will involve a hands-on agentic AI task.
• Over 10 years of full-stack software engineering experience. At least 3 years in a Tech Lead, Staff, or Principal role responsible for guiding the technical direction of a team or program.
• Product-engineer approach. You transform product ideas into operational, monitored, live software. You are comfortable prioritizing alongside PM or direct Product direction on your own, making product tradeoffs on the fly, and relying on metrics to guide iteration. You do not need a fully-detailed ticket to begin.
• Deep proficiency across the stack. Modern JavaScript / TypeScript and at least one of Go, Python, or C#. You write production code, not just review it.
• Strong systems and infrastructure foundation. AWS at scale, containerization, GitLab/GitHub CI/CD, PostgreSQL and data modeling, REST / gRPC / GraphQL API development, test automation, and a real point of view on observability and reliability.
• Architectural judgment. You can defend a build decision, change your mind when the evidence warrants it, and write the build doc that brings the rest of the team along.
• Business and product literacy. You can sit with a creative director, a retail partner, or a finance collaborator and have a conversation that is not purely technical. You can articulate business impact and tradeoffs without losing technical rigor.
• Outstanding communication and collaboration. You make engineers around you better. You raise standards without becoming a bottleneck. You handle disagreement directly and well.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. Computer Science, Information Technology, or comparable work experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience leading or contributing to platform / horizontal services (search, notifications, identity, eventing, workflow, data platforms) consumed by multiple product teams.
• Experience with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).
• Experience with Kubernetes, Akamai, Terraform, or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience operating in a tri-lead (TL / EM / PM) or similar matrixed engineering model.
• Foundational knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or the tabletop gaming space.