AI Builder — Senior Principal Engineer

Autodesk•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

This is a role for a seasoned software engineer who wants to fundamentally change how systems work. You will join a small, AI-native disrupt squad within Autodesk’s Platform Services & Emerging Technologies (PSET) organization, accountable for redefining how the platform is experienced, accessed, and built upon. You won’t be handed well-defined problems. You will identify high-leverage opportunities, define what should exist, and prove a dramatically better way through working systems, using any internal or external approaches. Your role is not just to explore ideas, but to make them real. Building proof points that are viable, scalable, and capable of reshaping the platform. This team does not operate in traditional roles. As an AI Builder, you bring product thinking, experience design, and engineering together in one motion, shaping workflows end-to-end. You will use AI, real systems, and rapid experimentation to reshape how work gets done for Autodesk teams and to determine which approaches truly deliver the best outcomes for our customers. Your focus is not on operating production systems. You are accountable for turning friction into opportunity and delivering near-production-grade proofs that make a new approach credible and hard to dismiss.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and operating production systems, with demonstrated accountability for defining technical direction, leading cross-team initiatives, and delivering system or platform-level outcomes
Strong system and architectural judgment across services, data, and workflows
Strong applied AI capability (structuring problems for agents, orchestrating tools and workflows, evaluating outputs; not just accelerating coding)
Strong product and workflow judgment, with a focus on leverage and outcomes
Strong software engineering fundamentals (APIs, distributed systems, data flows, debugging across systems) and ability to build end-to-end systems across the stack
Proven track record of solving complex, cross-domain problems and driving work from ambiguity to working systems independently
Demonstrated ability to deliver cross-team or organizational impact, not just local features
High learning velocity in rapidly evolving technical environments

Nice To Haves

Experience testing and comparing AI approaches within real workflows to determine what actually works
Hands-on experience building or orchestrating agent-based systems and tool integrations
Familiarity with prompt design, evaluation patterns, and rapid experimentation
Background in applied AI or hands-on engineering environments using modern AI tooling

Responsibilities

Find and work through seams, bottlenecks, and hand offs that make the platform harder to use than it should be, focusing on the ones where a different approach creates outsized impact
Engineer end-to-end, AI-native workflow proofs that turn fragmented systems into functioning, real-world workflows
Build working prototypes and scrappy, production-like implementations that prove something actually works; not just that it could
Use whatever tools, agents, and integrations are required, internal or external, to demonstrate a simpler, more effective way forward
Test and compare AI approaches in real workflows to determine what performs best in practice and can scale
Produce clear “before vs after” proof points that expose friction and make better approaches undeniable
Don’t just highlight what’s broken. Define and prototype how it should work instead, including paths to evolve the platform