Principal Engineer / Technical Lead

Aretec Inc•,

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Aretec is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer / Technical Lead to guide the architecture and implementation of Greenfield AI Solution within the existing Enterprise Search team. This is not an architect-only position: the successful candidate will make critical design decisions, write production code, lead integrations, review code, and manage technical risk across the application and AI stack.

Requirements

Deep hands-on software engineering experience across backend services, APIs, and modern web applications.
Demonstrated success leading architecture and complex implementations for enterprise or mission-critical systems.
Strong Python skills and practical experience with AI/LLM application architecture.
Experience with RAG, retrieval systems, agent orchestration, prompt frameworks, evaluation, and responsible-AI guardrails.
Strong system-integration, data-flow, testing, code-review, and technical-risk-management skills.
Ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, program leaders, and customer stakeholders.
Ability to work effectively within an existing multidisciplinary delivery team.
Only applicants who are sole U.S. Citizens can be considered for this position. Dual citizens are not eligible.

Nice To Haves

Experience delivering technology for federal agencies or other regulated environments.
Experience integrating with enterprise search, document intelligence, identity, or data platforms.
Knowledge of source attribution, model evaluation, human-in-the-loop workflows, and AI safety patterns.
Experience mentoring senior and intermediate engineers across AI, backend, frontend, and data disciplines.

Responsibilities

Own the overall technical architecture for AI Solution, including application, integration, data, and AI design decisions.
Provide hands-on technical leadership while designing, implementing, testing, and reviewing production code.
Lead complex integrations with Client, enterprise data platforms, authentication services, and supporting APIs.
Define scalable patterns for LLM integration, retrieval, agent orchestration, source traceability, evaluation, and guardrails.
Translate program objectives into an executable engineering roadmap, sequencing work according to value, complexity, cost, access, and risk.
Set engineering standards for security, reliability, maintainability, observability, documentation, and automated testing.
Identify architectural and delivery risks early; recommend mitigations and communicate tradeoffs to technical and program stakeholders.
Mentor engineers, facilitate design reviews, and resolve cross-stack technical issues without becoming detached from implementation.
Partner with federal stakeholders and the Client team to ensure outputs remain grounded in source material and support, not replace, human judgment.