Principal Engineer, AI Platform

Epic Games • Cary, NC

2d

About The Position

Epic Games is hiring a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and strategic vision for AI-powered platforms, tools, and services that improve development velocity and productivity across the company. The role is on the AI Engineering team within Online Infrastructure and focuses on production-grade developer tools used across Epic’s major codebases, including Unreal Engine and Fortnite. Example products include unified AI code review systems, cloud agent hosting, a centralized AI knowledge base, and developer experience tools used by thousands of employees.

The position combines hands-on engineering with architectural leadership. The Principal Engineer will set technical direction, establish best practices for AI-powered development tooling, mentor engineers, and shape how teams write, review, and ship code. The engineer will work with AI agents to implement, test, release, and operate critical platforms, and will partner with leadership and high-value teams to identify and develop strategic opportunities.

Requirements

• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience building production software systems.
• Track record of providing technical leadership for complex software projects from conception through delivery at scale.
• Experience owning a platform from zero to one, including leading its technical design, architectural strategy, and initial build-out before it is fully staffed and scaled.
• Expert-level experience with REST APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Experience operating and orchestrating scalable services on Kubernetes, including container lifecycle management and security configurations.
• Experience with and strong interest in using and building AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot.
• Ability to turn ambiguous organizational problems into concrete technical strategies and drive them to completion.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and architectural vision for production-grade AI developer tools used across Epic’s major codebases.
• Drive architectural decisions for scalable, maintainable developer-facing tools across CLI and desktop tools, web apps, build-process integrations, services, and APIs.
• Establish patterns and standards for modern AI frameworks and agent architectures.
• Partner with leadership and high-value teams to identify strategic opportunities and design, build, and validate new platforms.
• Design and implement security, governance, and compliance protocols for AI platforms, including secret management, workload identity, and runtime isolation policies.
• Define measurement strategies and success metrics to track and improve tool effectiveness.
• Mentor and grow a team of software engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and raise technical standards.
• Build complex aspects of the systems hands-on and use AI agents to implement, test, release, and operate platforms.

Benefits

• Company pays 100% of medical, dental, Vision HRA, long-term disability, life insurance, and 401(k) premiums for employees and dependents.
• 401(k) with competitive match.
• Mental well-being program through Modern Health, including free therapy and coaching for employees and dependents.
• Company events and company-wide paid breaks.
• Unlimited PTO and sick time.
• Paid sabbatical after seven years of employment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal