Sr. Principal Engineer

Wonder • District of Columbia, DC

1d • $305,000 - $330,000

About The Position

Wonder is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to help establish a new team and bring AI-enabled development practices to Wonder Engineering. The role designs and builds solutions for context fragmentation, including MCPs, CLIs, skills, sub-agents, and integrations that connect AI tooling to Wonder's codebases and systems. It also develops AI-assisted workflows used by engineers for code generation, review, testing, documentation, refactoring, and on-call and incident management.

The engineer brings proven AI-tooling patterns and practices from outside the company, working with engineers across Wonder as well as platform, infrastructure, and application teams. The position helps define autonomous development agents and cloud agent solutions, establish standards for AI-assisted development and AI-generated code review, and optimize AI costs through model selection and routing. The role owns developer tooling from design through production, helps define and measure developer velocity, and communicates technical decisions and practices through clear specifications and documentation.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including recent hands-on work building with or on top of LLM-based tooling such as agents, MCP servers, or coding assistants.
• Direct experience integrating AI tools into real development workflows, such as code review, testing, code generation, or documentation, beyond individual use as an end user.
• Strong system design skills and a track record of owning tools or platforms end-to-end, from design through adoption.
• Ability to operate with ambiguity and help shape practices for a new team without established playbooks.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs, webhooks, or other integration or message-based systems.
• Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, CI/CD systems, or other software primarily used by engineers.
• Pragmatic problem-solving approach and ability to troubleshoot complex technical obstacles.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, including ability to drive technical discussions with engineers and leaders across multiple teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Java/JVM and/or Python.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship context aggregation solutions, MCPs, CLIs, skills, and sub-agents that provide AI coding tools with sanctioned, reliable access to Wonder's codebases, services, and systems.
• Help define and establish Wonder's autonomous development agents and cloud agent solutions.
• Identify and adapt effective AI-assisted development practices for code review, testing, code generation, and documentation to Wonder's stack, scale, and constraints.
• Contribute to pre-review and triage tooling that automates mechanical and policy issues before human review, and help define standards for reviewing AI-generated code.
• Design and implement systems to optimize AI costs and abstract model selection from engineers by routing tasks to appropriate models at appropriate costs.
• Help define and measure developer velocity.
• Scope, design, and ship developer tooling with minimal oversight, weighing tradeoffs and partnering with platform, infrastructure, and application teams to deploy solutions in production.
• Write clear specifications and documentation, and provide, seek, and incorporate feedback.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with equity.
• 401(k).
• Choice of medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Company-paid short- and long-term disability coverage.
• Paid time off, including flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable law.
• Paid parental leave.
• Discounted meals and exclusive perks across the Wonder family of brands.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior