Principal Software Engineer, Agentic Engineering

About the role

We connect great people to great opportunities. Are you ready to take the next step? Discover a career in banking at Fifth Third Bank. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Agentic Engineering team.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers building production agents — setting direction, reviewing designs, mentoring, and unblocking.
• Define the team's engineering standards — agent patterns, tool integration, testing, code quality, observability, and review practices that hold the bar high.
• Arcitect the agent platform — the shared services and protocols (e.g., agent-to-agent messaging, tool servers) that let agents discover and compose with one another reliably.
• Stay hands-on — write code, prototype hard problems, and pair with engineers on the toughest parts of the system.
• Own the quality and safety of agent behavior — design how the team verifies that agents stay accurate, cost-efficient, and within guardrails over time.
• Translate vision into a roadmap — break an ambitious platform vision into shippable increments the team can execute and be proud of.
• Represent the team to leadership — communicate architecture, trade-offs, and progress clearly to engineering and product leadership.

What Differentiates This Role

• Work with engineers to build autonomous systems that reason — agents that make decisions, call tools, and message one another.
• Define how agents are built across the team — the shared patterns, base abstractions, and “paved road” that make new agents fast to build and safe to run.
• Design for non-deterministic behavior, edge cases, and failure — and build the testing and observability to catch them.
• Grow a team that can reason about non-deterministic systems — where correctness, cost, and safety all have to be designed in, not bolted on.

What You Will Bring

• 8–12+ years of software engineering experience with deep proficiency in Python and TypeScript.
• A track record of technically driving teams of engineers — mentoring, setting standards, and shipping complex systems together.
• Experience building agentic or multi-step automated systems — tool orchestration, LLM reasoning loops, or agent frameworks.
• The ability to set architectural direction and reusable patterns that other engineers adopt.
• Experience designing for non-deterministic behavior, edge cases, and failure — and building the testing and observability to catch them.

Nice to Have

• Experience building LLM safety, evaluation, or governance systems end-to-end.
• Retrieval / hybrid search over enterprise knowledge.
• Background in platform engineering or developer tooling at enterprise scale.
• Terraform and infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Open-source contributions on public GitHub.

Work Environment

Hybrid work. Candidates must be located in the Farmington Hills / Metro Detroit, Michigan area. No remote candidates.

Pay

The base salary for this position is reflective of the range of salary levels for all roles within this pay grade across the U.S. Individual salaries within this range will vary based on factors such as role, relevant skillset, relevant experience, education and geographic location.

Schedule

Not specified.

Benefits

In addition to the base salary, this role is eligible to participate in an incentive compensation plan, with any such payment based upon company, line of business and/or individual performance.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Fifth Third Bank, National Association is proud to have an engaged and inclusive culture and to promote and ensure equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.