Principal Engineer

Epic Games • Cary, NC

3d • Remote

About The Position

This role sits at the intersection of technical leadership and hands-on programming. You'll own the standards, architecture patterns, and programming practices that the org runs on. You'll also be the person we pull into our most complex and visible projects when they need principal-level programming muscle to get across the finish line. You will work alongside the team leads as a peer and influence the technical direction with a hands-on approach. In any given week this role may be defining a new AI-assisted development process, writing production code, and explaining complex technical decisions to executive leadership.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software programming experience, with meaningful time spent as a senior individual contributor or technical lead
• Deep, hands-on expertise in Python and Golang for production systems, as well as strong experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred)
• Real, practical experience building AI-powered systems: RAG architectures, prompt programming, context window management, LLM integrations, and agentic workflows, as well as familiarity with AI development tools like Claude Code and similar coding assistants, not just as a user but understanding how to build effective workflows around them
• Solid DevOps background: CI/CD (Github Actions preferred), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), automated testing, and release management
• Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems, APIs, and service deployments in production
• Demonstrated ability to context-switch between strategic technical leadership and deep hands-on programming work
• Experience setting and maintaining programming standards across multiple teams without having direct authority over those teams
• Strong communication skills. You can explain a technical decision to a director and a junior programmer in the same afternoon and both walk away understanding it
• Comfort with ambiguity. EPE solves problems across the entire company, so the domain changes constantly. You need to be someone who thrives on that, not someone who needs a narrow lane

Responsibilities

• Own technical standards, best practices, and architectural guidance across multiple teams
• Step into the org's highest-priority projects when they need hands-on help to ship
• Partner with team leads to raise the quality bar on design, code, and delivery
• Drive EPE's programming direction, including how we build with tools like Claude Code, Cloud Infrastructure, and LLM primitives
• Direct AI development tools to build, test, and review code.
• Debug problems and unblock teams
• Drive operational maturity: CI/CD pipelines, testing practices, code quality, observability, and infrastructure-as-code, as well as evaluate new tools and patterns, then help teams adopt them without disrupting delivery
• Mentor programmers across multiple teams in both software development and AI programming, as well as represent EPE's technical direction in cross-org conversations with other programming leaders and executives at Epic

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision HRA
• Long Term Disability
• Life Insurance
• 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, which provides free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents
• Events and 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