Principal Agentic AI Engineer
About The Position
Hover is seeking a Principal Agentic AI Engineer to lead the architecture, technical strategy, and operational rigor behind their next generation of autonomous systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on agentic AI, where the engineer will stay close to architecture, evaluation systems, debugging, and critical implementation details. The role involves working at the intersection of multi-agent orchestration, agentic systems reliability, human-in-the-loop operational design, and enterprise-grade AI trust. The goal is to transition an entire industry from manual workflows to autonomous systems. The engineer will contribute by designing and evolving Hover’s multi-agent architecture, defining the boundary between deterministic systems and LLM-driven reasoning, building confidence-tier systems, and staying hands-on with critical technical challenges. They will also build evaluation frameworks, partner with Product and Design to shape the UX of autonomy, and translate business intent into engineering plans. Additionally, the role involves setting the technical roadmap for agentic AI, coaching engineers, and raising the engineering bar around operational excellence.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex production systems.
- Experience building and shipping production AI systems under real customer load and reliability expectations.
- Deep systems-thinking capability across reliability, observability, failure modes, state management, and graceful degradation.
- Strong product judgment around what to automate versus where humans should remain in the loop.
- Clear technical opinions on the boundary between deterministic systems and LLM-driven reasoning.
- Exceptional communication skills, including technical design docs and executive-level tradeoff discussions.
- A passion for mentoring engineers and building strong, collaborative teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in regulated or high-trust domains such as insurance, fintech, healthcare, or legal.
- Experience with confidence scoring, self-healing systems, critique-loop architectures, or AI evaluation frameworks.
- Background as a founding engineer, principal engineer, or technical lead within an AI-native company.
- Strong distributed systems or platform engineering foundations that evolved into applied AI leadership.
Responsibilities
- Design and evolve Hover’s multi-agent architecture, including orchestration, handoff logic, retry/fallback systems, observability, and state management.
- Define the boundary between deterministic systems and LLM-driven reasoning by deciding when the model should reason versus when the system should enforce.
- Build confidence-tier systems, escalation paths, and auditability frameworks that allow enterprise customers to trust autonomous outputs.
- Stay hands-on with critical technical challenges, debugging pipelines and improving production reliability.
- Build evaluation frameworks that define what is “good enough to ship,” including regression detection, customer-specific acceptance criteria, and operational benchmarking.
- Partner closely with Product and Design to shape the UX of autonomy — confidence thresholds, override logic, checkpoints, and collaborator workflows.
- Translate business intent into pragmatic engineering plans and represent engineering clearly in leadership discussions.
- Bring clarity and momentum to ambiguous technical and operational problems.
- Set and execute the 6–12 month technical roadmap for agentic AI at Hover.
- Coach engineers and senior ICs to think in systems, operate with product rigor, and ship reliable production software.
- Raise the engineering bar around operational excellence, architecture quality, and delivery discipline.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a fast-growing company
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents
- Unlimited and flexible vacation policy
- Generous paid parental and new child bonding leave
- A day set aside each month to allow employees to recharge
- Recurring fitness classes, meditation/ mindfulness tools, virtual therapy, and family planning assistance
- Help cover the cost of management training, conferences, workshops, or certifications
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
