Principal AI Engineer

LINQ•Austin, TX

2d•$190,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

LINQ is building AI into the way we work — not as a layer on top, but as part of how every team operates. We need a builder to lead that work from the inside. This is an embedded role. You will sit with teams across LINQ — starting with Go-to-Market and Customer Experience — map how they work today, simplify the workflows that slow them down, and ship the agents that take real work off people’s plates. You’ll package what you build as reusable skills the rest of LINQ can adopt, instrument the results, and hand it back. Then you move to the next team. You will also help define how LINQ’s internal agent platform takes shape — the orchestration patterns, the skills library, and the evaluation discipline that make agent work compound across teams. The patterns you set become how LINQ runs on AI at scale. This is not a research role, a strategy role, or a program management role. You will be expected to ship things, measure whether they worked, and iterate. You will be the technical substance behind LINQ’s AI transformation; we have leaders who own the strategy and the program ops, and you will partner closely with them.

Requirements

8+ years building production software. The bulk of this role is shipping, and you should be comfortable doing it without a team behind you.
Direct experience building agents — multi-step, tool-using LLM workflows running in a production or near-production context. You’ve thought about evals, guardrails, failure modes, cost, and handoff to humans.
Working knowledge of the modern agent stack: foundation model APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent), at least one agent framework (LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic tool use, or similar), MCP, and evaluation tooling.
Track record of driving adoption of new tools and practices across an organization, with measurable results to show for it.
Strong fluency across the stack: scripting, light app development, API integrations, data pipelines, evaluation harnesses. You can build the thing, not just specify it.
Exceptional written and verbal communication. You can explain an eval result to a CFO and debug a tool-call chain with an engineer in the same afternoon.
Comfort with ambiguity. You will define the path, not walk one that’s already paved.
Experience in a PE-backed, multi-product SaaS environment, or somewhere with comparable operational complexity.

Nice To Haves

Experience shaping an internal AI or agent platform — orchestration, skills libraries, eval pipelines, observability.
Familiarity with the SKILL.md / agent-skill pattern, or equivalent approaches to packaging reusable agent capabilities.
Experience building MCP servers or other integrations that connect LLMs to real enterprise systems.
Background in developer experience, internal tools, platform engineering, or forward-deployed engineering.
Experience in K–12 education technology or another regulated vertical (healthcare, fintech, government), and familiarity with FERPA, COPPA, SOC 2, or HIPAA.
Fluency in JavaScript or TypeScript, React, Node.js, and AWS — our primary stack.
Track record of standing up and scaling internal programs or communities of practice.

Responsibilities

Embed with teams across LINQ to learn how the work actually gets done, where the friction lives, and where agents can meaningfully simplify it. The unit of work is real workflows, not novelty demos.
Design and ship multi-step, tool-using agents that take work off people’s plates. Build with the right tools for the job — foundation model APIs, MCP servers, agent frameworks (LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic tool use patterns, or whatever fits the problem). Bias toward production-ready, not demo-ready.
Build durable, not disposable. The agent you ship to CX should leave behind reusable skills the next team can pick up, not a black box that only you understand. Think in primitives and patterns, not scripts.
Take evals and guardrails seriously. You know why a 95%-reliable agent is sometimes worse than a 70%-reliable one with a clear handoff, and you build accordingly.
Instrument what you build. Define the metrics, stand up the dashboards, and prove the impact in time saved, errors avoided, or work that no longer needs doing.
Hand it back. Train the team, document the patterns, and transition ownership to an internal champion or sustaining team so you can move to the next workflow.
Help define LINQ’s internal agent platform — how agents are built, evaluated, deployed, and observed. Set the patterns that the rest of LINQ’s AI work compounds against.
Establish the skills pattern — how reusable agent capabilities get packaged, versioned, evaluated, and shared across teams. This becomes the unit of leverage across LINQ.
Shape the orchestration approach — how agents discover tools, hand off to each other, escalate to humans, and remain observable when things go wrong. Use existing frameworks where they fit; build only what we genuinely need.
Evaluate and recommend AI tooling: foundation models, agent frameworks, MCP servers, automation platforms, eval and observability tooling. Make clear build-vs-buy-vs-integrate recommendations.
Co-launch an internal AI champions network alongside our Senior Director of Operations. You will own the technical substance — agent templates, reusable skills, evaluation harnesses, MCP integrations — that champions take back to their teams.
Run office hours, workshops, and enablement sessions calibrated to the audience — engineers one day, finance leaders the next.
Translate what you ship into business-relevant language. Surface success stories. Build the momentum.
Partner with the CTO on LINQ’s AI strategy and adoption roadmap; produce the proof points, case studies, and metrics that inform our board and investor narrative.
Work with Security and Compliance to ensure every agent and tool you ship meets FERPA, COPPA, PCI, and CCPA requirements. We operate in a regulated environment; this is non-negotiable.
Track the AI vendor, model, and agent-platform landscape and bring informed recommendations to LINQ’s leadership.

Benefits

401(k) plan comes with a 4% employer match on total earnings (not just your base salary).
Annual performance bonus
Long-term incentive participation
Flexible Open Paid Time Off Plan
Paid Parental Leave
Ten Paid Corporate Holidays
16 paid volunteer hours to support the causes that matter most to you.
Medical coverage
Dental coverage
Vision coverage
Low deductible PPO plan
Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP)
Health Savings Account (HSA) with contributions from LINQ
Dental perks that even cover braces for the kiddos.
Employer-paid Short-Term Disability
Employer-paid Long Term Disability
Employer-paid Basic Life insurance
Employer-paid AD&D insurance
Gym reimbursements
Travel assistance
Employee assistance program
Pet insurance options
Referral bonus