Principal Engineer, AI Platform

Epic Games • Cary, NC

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Epic Games is seeking a Principal Engineer for its AI Platform team. This role involves architecting and building production systems from the ground up to create an enterprise-grade stack of agentic AI systems. These systems will automate engineering workflows, accelerate developer productivity, and enable new forms of collaboration across Epic's teams. The work is foundational, defining how AI will be used at Epic for the next decade, operating at massive scale with complex distributed systems and security challenges. The Principal Engineer will own the technical direction of the agent infrastructure stack, driving architectural decisions, solving hard problems, and mentoring other engineers. This is a hands-on role involving production code, protocol design, and accountability for system reliability.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years at staff or principal scope.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems: event-driven architectures, durable execution, service mesh, and multi-tenant platform design.
• Production experience with authentication and authorization infrastructure — OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SPIFFE/SPIRE or equivalent workload identity, token exchange (RFC 8693), and policy engines (OPA, OpenFGA, or comparable).
• Strong security engineering fundamentals: credential vaulting, secrets management (OpenBao/Vault), audit trail design, and least-privilege access at scale.
• Fluency in at least one compiled, systems-capable language (Go preferred, Rust or C++ acceptable); comfort reading and writing Go microservices is essential.
• Track record of owning multi-service platform architecture across a full product lifecycle — from design through sustained production operation.
• Exceptional written communication: design documents and architecture reviews that are clear, precise, and influence without authority.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-integrated systems: agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or equivalent agent-to-tool middleware.
• Experience with plugin or extension runtime design — WASM sandboxing, gRPC sidecar patterns, subprocess isolation, or comparable capability security models.
• Familiarity with knowledge graph systems (Neo4j or comparable), vector databases, and hybrid retrieval (semantic + keyword + graph).
• Experience operating Kubernetes-based platforms: scheduling, workload identity, sidecar injection, and multi-tenancy isolation.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture across Epic's AI Infrastructure Platforms, ensuring coherence and well-defined integration seams.
• Drive architectural decisions for agent identity and workload authorization, translating security requirements into implementable designs.
• Establish patterns for how AI agents authenticate, receive credentials, execute tools, and are audited, maintaining correctness across the stack.
• Lead design reviews for new capabilities, evaluate build vs. buy decisions, and identify technical risks.
• Design and implement Cluster API and provider abstractions for EMA, managing headless agent runs across various compute backends.
• Evolve Epic's AI MCP Gateway plugin runtime and its security posture.
• Architect Epic's knowledge graph, vector search, and memory consolidation pipeline for org-wide scale.
• Define durability, consistency, and isolation requirements across event-driven architectures.
• Lead the AI NHI Identity proposal from strategy to execution, defining separation of concerns and migrating the credential vault.
• Hold the standard for credential security across the stack.
• Work with Epic's security organization to ensure agent-to-service trust models meet enterprise standards.
• Partner with product, ML, and enterprise platform teams to shape agent capability exposure.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, conduct technical interviews, and raise the hiring bar.
• Write design documents that serve as reference architecture for future work.
• Write production code, design protocols, and make critical architectural decisions.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision HRA
• Long Term Disability
• Life Insurance
• 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health (free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents)
• Company events
• Company-wide paid breaks
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• Paid sabbatical for 7 years of employment

What This Job Offers

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