Principal Software Engineer – Data & AI

BLUE ORIGIN•Seattle, WA

1d•$230,773 - $323,082

About The Position

This role is part of Enterprise Technology (ET), where we’re developing the digital infrastructure needed to build the road to space, with an emphasis on digital capabilities required to advance Blue Origin’s mission. Enterprise Technology is the center of excellence for digital technology at Blue Origin, providing oversight and governance to align technology and business strategies. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Blue Origin finds, reasons over, and acts on its enterprise knowledge. As a senior individual contributor, you'll own the architecture of our agentic AI platform - the lakehouse, knowledge graph, retrieval systems, and natural-language interfaces that help engineering, manufacturing, and mission teams find critical data in seconds, not days. You'll lead through technical credibility, not reporting authority - staying hands-on, writing production code, and proving out the hard parts yourself. Your impact is enterprise-wide. Your work reaches engineers designing engines, technicians building vehicles, quality teams investigating anomalies, and mission teams in flight, and is increasingly reused by other products through shared APIs and MCPs.

Requirements

10+ years building production software, with 7+ years of cross-team architecture ownership or technical leadership.
Delivered production LLM, RAG, or agentic AI systems end to end - ingestion, retrieval, reranking, prompt and context design, serving.
Built and operated an enterprise data platform - a lakehouse or distributed architecture (Spark, Delta Lake, or equivalent), with a metadata-driven ingestion framework - including schema evolution, pipeline reliability, and workload cost.
Full-stack depth: production Python, REST/GraphQL API design, and AWS with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CDK) and mature CI/CD.
Passion for Blue Origin’s mission and ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Nice To Haves

Lakehouse platforms (Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog)
Knowledge graphs (Neo4j, Neptune)
Enterprise search (Sinequa, OpenSearch)
Natural-language-to-SQL
AI observability, inference cost and latency optimization
Multi-modal AI over documents, imagery, or telemetry
Graduate degree or published open-source work in applied AI

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and roadmap for Blue Origin's agentic AI, retrieval, and semantic reasoning platform.
Stay hands-on across the full stack - write production code, build reference implementations, and prove out the hard parts yourself rather than delegating and reviewing.
Design shared capabilities for reuse - exposed through documented APIs and MCPs - so other teams and products adopt them instead of rebuilding data and AI foundations.
Set architecture direction across the platform portfolio (ingestion, knowledge graph, enterprise search, natural-language-to-SQL, multi-modal evidence), establishing reusable patterns and CI/CD, IaC, and release standards.
Mentor senior / mid-level engineers and steward the standards, ADRs, and reference implementations that raise the whole team's bar.
Establish AI evaluation and observability as engineering disciplines: regression suites, accuracy thresholds, and release gates, plus tracing and metrics (latency, cost, hallucination rate, relevance) on every production surface.
Make AI output defensible - set the standard that answers trace to source-grounded evidence with provenance, access control, and confidence, and drive retrieval and generation quality through offline and online evaluation.