Principal AI-Native Software Engineer

AT&T•Alpharetta, GA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

AT&T is seeking a Principal AI-Native Software Engineer to translate complex business needs into intelligent, production-ready software. The role works across software engineering, agentic AI, LLM-powered applications, and enterprise automation, partnering directly with business and technical stakeholders to move ideas from concept to production. The engineer builds scalable Python services, APIs, agentic workflows, and integrations for intelligent automation across AT&T. This is a production engineering role focused on delivering secure, reliable, observable, maintainable solutions—not simply AI experimentation. The position is full-time and onsite at a designated work location five days per week. No relocation is offered. Weekly hours are 40. Listed locations are Alpharetta and Atlanta, Georgia; Bothell, Washington; Dallas and Plano, Texas; and Middletown, New Jersey. The annual salary range is $155,400 to $261,100. Individual starting salary may depend on geography, experience, expertise, and education or training.

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience building and delivering production applications or services.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Strong Python development experience, ideally with FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
Hands-on experience designing and developing REST APIs and backend or microservice architectures.
Experience integrating applications with enterprise platforms, databases, APIs, or distributed systems.
Strong knowledge of SQL and relational databases; NoSQL or document database experience is beneficial.
Experience with unit testing, integration testing, automated testing, CI/CD, code review, and refactoring.
Experience with Docker and deployment into cloud or enterprise environments.
Working knowledge of production monitoring using structured logging, metrics, tracing, performance analysis, and incident troubleshooting.
Understanding of secure API development, authentication and authorization, secrets management, least privilege, and audit logging.
Hands-on experience integrating LLMs or Generative AI capabilities into software applications.
Experience with tool or function calling, structured prompting, output validation, RAG, retrieval, or other grounding techniques.
Demonstrated use of AI coding assistants as part of the software development lifecycle.
Strong understanding of AI-native software development, including where LLMs and agentic workflows provide meaningful value.
Ability to build agentic solutions that execute multi-step workflows, use tools, interact with systems, and manage state.
Strong knowledge of software architecture, system design, API design, data modeling, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
Experience designing software for production requirements, including security, scalability, resiliency, observability, maintainability, and operational support.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to engineering and non-technical business partners.
Ability to move from an ambiguous business problem to a working technical solution and use modern AI development tools to accelerate delivery without sacrificing software quality.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with LangGraph or comparable agent orchestration frameworks.
Experience designing multi-agent or multi-step agentic workflows.
Experience with Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or other workflow and orchestration technologies.
Knowledge of event-driven architectures using Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pub/Sub, or comparable technologies.
Experience implementing RAG, embeddings, semantic or vector search, and vector databases in production environments.
Experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, API gateways, or service mesh technologies.
Experience developing reusable SDKs, internal developer platforms, AI tool libraries, or reference architectures.
Experience developing with Angular or another modern JavaScript/TypeScript front-end framework.

Responsibilities

Design and build production-grade AI-enabled applications, backend services, and REST APIs using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
Create agentic AI workflows using LangGraph or similar frameworks, including tool calling, routing, planning and execution, multi-step workflows, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
Partner with business and technical stakeholders in a collaborative 2-in-a-box model, translating ambiguous business challenges into technical designs and working solutions.
Integrate AI applications securely with enterprise APIs, databases, event streams, service gateways, and internal platforms.
Design reliable tool and service contracts for AI agents, including schemas, validation, idempotency, retries, rate limits, error handling, and access controls.
Develop evaluation strategies for AI and agentic systems, including success criteria, regression testing, prompt and tool validation, guardrails, and release gates.
Implement RAG, vector search, context engineering, structured outputs, and grounding techniques when appropriate to improve accuracy and usability.
Build end-to-end solutions across backend services, databases, and front-end experiences using technologies such as Angular and other modern web frameworks.
Apply secure-by-design practices, including authentication, authorization, secrets management, least privilege, auditability, input validation, and PII-aware data handling.
Build production observability with logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerting, and incident troubleshooting.
Implement automated testing, CI/CD, Docker-based deployment, and resilient distributed-system patterns such as retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, backpressure, and graceful degradation.
Use AI coding assistants for code generation, refactoring, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining rigorous engineering standards.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision coverage
401(k) plan
Tuition reimbursement program
Paid time off and holidays, including at least 23 vacation days each year and 9 company-designated holidays, based on date of hire
Paid parental leave
Paid caregiver leave
Additional sick leave may be available beyond what state and local law require; this leave is unprotected
Adoption reimbursement
Short- and long-term disability benefits
Life and accidental death insurance
Supplemental benefits, including critical illness, accident, hospital indemnity, and group legal programs
Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
Employee wellness programs
Employee discounts of up to 50% on eligible AT&T mobility plans and accessories, AT&T internet (including fiber where available), and AT&T phone