Principal Engineer, API & MCP Platform

Hatch IT • Somerville, MA

21h • Hybrid

About The Position

Babel Street is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead Babel Street’s API and MCP platform strategy and delivery as we evolve toward an AI-native, agent-driven platform. This is a hands-on, senior technical leadership role responsible for defining and delivering API-first platform capabilities that enable both developers and AI agents to interact with Babel Street’s services. You will lead the design and implementation of semantic APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and context-aware service patterns that power next-generation intelligence workflows. This role requires a finger-on-keyboard engineer who can both define direction and deliver foundational systems. You will partner closely with AI, Data, and Platform teams to ensure Babel Street’s APIs and services are consistent, discoverable, scalable, and optimized for agentic workflows. You will work in close partnership with the Architecture function to align on long-term technical direction, ensuring API and MCP platform decisions are consistent with the company’s broader architectural vision while maintaining a strong focus on execution and delivery. This is a hybrid role working out of either their Reston, VA or Somerville, MA office. Full remote may be considered.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience operating at Principal Engineer or Staff+ level
• Strong hands-on experience building distributed systems
• Experience designing and building API-first platforms
• Experience with cloud-native architectures (GCP preferred)
• Experience building developer platforms or service-oriented architectures
• Strong system design and architectural thinking skills
• Proven ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on work with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Familiarity with Vertex AI Agent Engine
• Background in ADK and reasoning frameworks such as LangChain
• Understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Exposure to data warehouse technologies like BigQuery and Snowflake
• Knowledge of Apigee or similar API gateway solutions
• Proven ability to design semantic APIs for AI or agent-driven use cases
• Experience managing context or building memory systems
• Development of agent-based architectures or orchestration frameworks
• Exposure to Anti-Gravity

Responsibilities

• Define and lead Babel Street’s API-first platform strategy, establishing consistent patterns for service design, versioning, discoverability, and governance.
• Help evolve the platform toward agent-ready APIs, ensuring services are consumable by both human developers and AI agents.
• Establish standards for API consistency, reliability, and performance across the organization.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams to ensure APIs are designed as first-class platform capabilities, not just service interfaces.
• Lead Babel Street’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) strategy and implementation, enabling agents and AI systems to interact with services in a standardized and scalable way.
• Define patterns for MCP service exposure, tool and service discovery, agent-to-service communication, and context-aware interactions.
• Partner closely with AI and platform teams to enable agent-native workflows across the organization.
• Lead the design of semantic, agent-friendly APIs, where documentation becomes a first-class interface for AI-driven systems.
• Define standards for API descriptions optimized for agents, schema consistency and semantic modeling, tool and service discoverability, and API documentation optimized for agent consumption.
• Establish best practices for documentation-as-code, ensuring APIs are designed for both developers and AI systems.
• Define patterns for context-aware APIs and services, including context management and retrieval, context caching, session and state management, and memory-aware service interactions.
• Help design scalable context-aware systems leveraging technologies such as Vertex AI Context Caching and related frameworks.
• Partner closely with Architecture to define and lead Babel Street’s API and MCP platform strategy.
• Design and deliver semantic, agent-ready APIs.
• Establish MCP standards and implementation patterns.
• Define context management patterns for agent workflows.
• Partner with AI and Data teams to enable agent-native architectures.
• Establish API governance and platform standards.
• Build foundational frameworks and reusable components.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship.
• Partner with Google and other vendors on platform capabilities.
• Drive adoption of API and MCP standards across engineering teams.

What This Job Offers

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