Principal Software Engineer

About the role

Vestmark is building the AI-native future of wealth management technology. We are seeking a Principal Engineer who can architect and deliver systems that implement sense → think → act loops, drive the engineering organization towards autonomous workflows, and establish standards for AI-native development.

Responsibilities

• Design & Build Agentic Systems

  • Architect and deliver agentic systems that implement sense → think → act loops
  • Drive the engineering organization beyond prompt-response patterns to multi-step, autonomous workflows
  • Engineer AI-driven workflows where AI takes action, produces measurable output, and improves through iteration and feedback

• Set Standards for AI-Native Development

  • Define how engineers use AI-assisted development tools as a team-wide engineering discipline
  • Establish and evolve standards for AI-native systems
  • Define testing and validation approaches for adaptive systems
  • Serve as the engineering organization's authority on AI-native development practices and drive their adoption across teams

• Build Reusable Foundations

  • Design and deliver frameworks, integration patterns, and technical capabilities that reduce the cost of building every subsequent solution
  • Apply the principle "fix the process, don't automate the broken one"
  • Remain a hands-on practitioner: write clean, testable, maintainable code and hold the team to that standard through rigorous code review

• Lead & Grow the Organization

  • Collaborate across engineering, product, and operations to share what's working, surface what isn't, and help AI-native practices take hold organically
  • Contribute to how Vestmark thinks about building AI-native software
  • Share what you know freely, whether that's pairing on a hard problem, reviewing a design, or helping a teammate get more out of their AI tooling
  • Contribute to the growth and development of our core values: We Before Me, Positive Energy, Knowledge Explorer, and Own It

Qualifications

• Core Engineering Excellence

  • Demonstrated expertise building and delivering complex, production-grade software systems
  • Strong fundamentals across the full engineering lifecycle
  • Comfort designing systems where behavior is non-deterministic and may evolve over time
  • Experience with AWS or equivalent cloud-native environments, CI/CD pipelines, and modern deployment patterns

• Agentic Engineering & AI Expertise

  • Proven, hands-on experience building agentic systems
  • Deep practical knowledge of LLM integration
  • A clear, defensible point of view on how AI is reshaping software engineering
  • Understanding of how AI systems interact with data, services, external tools, and real-world operational constraints
  • Awareness of the trade-offs unique to AI-native systems
  • Experience designing feedback loops where systems improve through usage, data, and iteration

• Independence & Technical Leadership

  • Track record of setting technical direction that others have adopted
  • Ability to engage with ambiguous, real-world business problems

Education & Experience

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• Typically 12+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; 8+ years with a Master's degree; or equivalent demonstrated expertise
• A sustained track record at the Principal or equivalent senior IC level, with evidence of technical direction that extended beyond individual projects and influenced how others build