Principal AI Software Engineer

Tricentis • Austin, TX

15h

About The Position

We are seeking a Principal AI Software Engineer to define and drive the engineering vision across multiple teams, aligning technology direction with company-wide business objectives. This role involves mentoring and developing Engineers through structured coaching, architectural sponsorship, and deliberate investment in their growth as technical decision makers. You will shape the engineering culture by establishing shared standards, raising the technical bar in hiring, and influencing how engineering competency is grown across Engineering levels. You will partner with VPs of Engineering, Product, and other executives to co-create technical strategy, bringing a long horizon, systems-level perspective to roadmap and investment decisions. You will also define and steward reference architectures, frameworks, and engineering patterns that are adopted org-wide, creating leverage across teams rather than within a single one. This role requires leading multi-quarter, high-ambiguity technical initiatives from problem definition through to sustained production impact, operating effectively without a defined playbook. You will identify and resolve systemic, cross-cutting technical issues that span multiple teams or domains — distinguishing the root cause from the symptom and building durable solutions. Additionally, you will establish org-wide standards for AI system quality: testing strategies, evaluation frameworks, safety and reliability patterns, and deployment criteria for LLM-based systems. You will publish internal frameworks, design patterns, and post-mortems that elevate engineering practice across the organization; and contribute externally through writing, speaking, or open-source where appropriate. Finally, you will champion engineering excellence as an organizational force to drive continuous improvement in practices, tooling, and developer experience at scale.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience with Python in production environments, with a track record of building systems that have scaled across organizations.
• 3+ years of experience designing, deploying, and operating language model–based solutions at production scale, including demonstrated ownership of LLM system reliability, evaluation, and iteration strategy.
• Deep, hands-on fluency with AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) as a core part of engineering workflow, and a demonstrated ability to shape team-wide adoption and best practices around these tools.
• Recognized expertise in the AI/ML tooling ecosystem — including agentic frameworks, MCP, A2A protocols, and the evolving GenAI infrastructure landscape with a history of translating emerging technology into production grade capabilities.
• Proven ability to build systems that are simultaneously innovative, reliable, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business needs — with the judgment to know when to move fast and when to invest in foundations.
• Mastery of software engineering fundamentals — architecture patterns, CI/CD, testing strategy, observability, and code quality — and a demonstrated record of establishing these standards at the organizational level.
• Expert-level understanding of security, privacy, and compliance requirements in AI-enabled enterprise systems.
• Extensive experience with container orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure in production, including ownership of platform-level decisions that affect multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose, communicate, and permanently resolve high-severity production issues involving complex AI systems.
• Exceptional ability to communicate across the full organizational stack — from detailed technical design with engineers to strategic framing with executives — calibrating depth and abstraction with precision.
• A track record of driving major technical decisions and organizational change through influence rather than authority, including across teams and domains outside your direct scope.
• Ability to synthesize ambiguity into a coherent technical vision, align diverse stakeholders around it, and sustain that alignment over time.
• Recognized internally — and ideally externally — as a credible technical voice, someone whose perspective shapes how the organization thinks about hard problems.
• U.S. Work Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without current or future sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the engineering vision across multiple teams, aligning technology direction with company-wide business objectives.
• Mentor and develop Engineers through structured coaching, architectural sponsorship, and deliberate investment in their growth as technical decision makers.
• Shape the engineering culture by establishing shared standards, raising the technical bar in hiring, and influencing how engineering competency is grown across Engineering levels.
• Partner with VPs of Engineering, Product, and other executives to co-create technical strategy, bringing a long horizon, systems-level perspective to roadmap and investment decisions.
• Define and steward reference architectures, frameworks, and engineering patterns that are adopted org-wide, creating leverage across teams rather than within a single one.
• Lead multi-quarter, high-ambiguity technical initiatives from problem definition through to sustained production impact, operating effectively without a defined playbook.
• Identify and resolve systemic, cross-cutting technical issues that span multiple teams or domains — distinguishing the root cause from the symptom and building durable solutions.
• Establish org-wide standards for AI system quality: testing strategies, evaluation frameworks, safety and reliability patterns, and deployment criteria for LLM-based systems.
• Publish internal frameworks, design patterns, and post-mortems that elevate engineering practice across the organization; contribute externally through writing, speaking, or open-source where appropriate.
• Champion engineering excellence as an organizational force to drive continuous improvement in practices, tooling, and developer experience at scale.

Benefits

• Tricentis is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or physical and mental disability and other statuses protected by law.
• Global Sanctions Compliance: We comply with all applicable global sanctions and export control laws. Candidates must not be listed on any government restricted party lists (including OFAC SDN List and U.S. Commerce Department restricted lists) and must certify that their employment would not violate any sanctions or export control regulations. Candidates must notify us of any changes to their status during the application process or subsequent employment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed