Principal, AI Engineering

Job Description

Job Description

Principal, AI Engineering

What You’ll Do

Our client recently formed a dedicated AI Research & Engineering team, and we're looking for a Principal AI Engineer to serve as its technical anchor.

This is a senior individual contributor role by design. You won't manage people; you'll do the work, set the technical standard, and lead through expertise. You'll be the primary driver of the client’s agentic AI capabilities, architecting and building the systems that connect AI agents to real enterprise workflows in one of the most consequential and carefully regulated environments in financial markets. You'll shape the AI roadmap alongside the Executive Director of AI Engineering, mentor junior engineers, and have time for experimentation with frontier tools. Our team works directly with AWS and Anthropic, accessing Claude models through both.

If you're a seasoned engineer who wants to stay hands-on, lead through technical excellence, and build agentic AI systems that matter this role was written for you.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

• • Partner with the Executive Director of AI Engineering to define and execute the AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions
  • Lead agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows
  • Leverage direct relationships with AWS and Anthropic to evaluate and adopt new model capabilities and tooling as they become available
  • Build and ship production AI applications on AWS using Claude and related Anthropic tooling, maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and auditability
  • Architect scalable systems that integrate LLMs and AI agents into the internal systems, operational workflows, and business processes, owning decisions from design through production deployment
  • Serve as the primary technical mentor for junior engineers: conducting code and architecture reviews, modeling engineering best practices, and raising the team's overall technical level (no direct reports)
  • Define and enforce AI safety standards appropriate for a regulated SIFMU environment, including hallucination detection, output validation, bias assessment, and audit trails that satisfy SEC and CFTC oversight expectations
  • Establish responsible AI practices and safety guardrails for LLM applications operating on sensitive financial data
  • Navigate change management and security review processes when deploying AI systems into production
  • Evaluate emerging AI technologies and provide concrete, risk-aware recommendations on adoption

Required

• • Experience mentoring and elevating junior engineers

Preferred

• • Exceptional ability to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders
  • Background in financial market infrastructure, derivatives, or similarly regulated industries

Technical Skills:

Required

• • Expert-level Python; proficient in SQL
  • Deep system design expertise: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, and MCP servers
  • Hands-on experience with data engineering: pipelines, transformation, and data modeling
  • AWS experience; comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
  • Strong production AI/LLM experience, or demonstrated hands-on passion for the space with the engineering depth to ramp quickly
  • Strong working knowledge of AI risk vectors: hallucinations, prompt injection, bias, data privacy, and output validation

Preferred

• • Production experience building and operating LLM-powered applications
  • Experience designing and operating agentic AI systems in enterprise environments
  • Experience with context engineering strategies including RAG, prompt architecture, and retrieval pipeline design
  • Familiarity with frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and hands-on experimentation with emerging tools
  • Hands-on experience with Anthropic's tooling and APIs, including the Claude API, Claude.ai, or the Anthropic Console
  • Experience connecting AI agents to enterprise systems and workflows
  • Infrastructure as code (Terraform)

Education and/or Experience:

• • Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or a related technical field
  • 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated technical leadership

5+ years as a senior individual contributor on complex, high-stakes production systems

We care about the success of each member of out team! We strive for long lasting partnerships where you can grow and expand your career.

Company Description

We care about the success of each member of out team! We strive for long lasting partnerships where you can grow and expand your career.