Principal AI-Native Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Serbia.

📋 Description

• Collaborate with subject-matter experts from portfolio companies to transform functional specifications into effective agentic system designs.

• Create agent architectures, encompassing boundaries, orchestration, control flow, tools, state, memory, human-in-the-loop placements, and deterministic logic.

• Develop, deploy, and maintain production agentic systems for real-world business functions from start to finish.

• Enhance and reinforce the internal orchestration framework.

• Optimize automated development and QA agents within the engineering pipeline.

• Generate and sustain machine-readable context artifacts for products, customers, processes, and operational data.

• Formulate retrieval and context-assembly strategies while managing context budgets.

• Integrate agentic systems with codebases, CRMs, ERPs, support desks, data warehouses, and internal services.

• Establish success criteria and construct evaluation harnesses, baselines, regression suites, and human-review sampling.

• Implement systems with tracing and observability features.

• Create guardrails, fallbacks, retries, circuit breakers, approval gates, audit trails, and rollback paths.

• Monitor token and tool costs while designing sustainable unit economics at scale.

• Observe evaluation trends, cost curves, and production failure patterns.

• Investigate and address regressions, incidents, and quality drifts.

• Adapt deployed systems as business processes evolve.

• Become familiar with unfamiliar production codebases and extend them safely.

• Extract reusable components, patterns, and abstractions across various functions and companies.

• Assess emerging models, frameworks, techniques, and tools against real workloads.

• Define responsible autonomous-operation practices addressing data exposure, IP protection, security boundaries, and human review.

• Review agentic work throughout the organization and elevate technical standards.

• Clarify system behavior, constraints, and intent to engineers and operators.

• Retire underperforming systems and document the rationale behind the decisions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; shipped systems can substitute for a degree.

• Over 8 years of hands-on software engineering experience in building and operating production systems.

• More than 3 years of experience in developing AI-Native or agentic systems that have reached production and supported real work.

• Proven end-to-end ownership of systems from design to operation and improvement.

• Experience integrating AI systems with production codebases, CRMs, ERPs, support and ticketing systems, data warehouses, and internal services.

• Familiarity with authentication, permissioning, and controls for autonomous systems.

• Experience in designing and conducting evaluations for non-deterministic systems.

• Background in building evaluation harnesses, baselines, and regression detection.

• Experience operating LLM-based systems in production, including tracing, failure diagnosis, guardrails, and managing costs at scale.

• Ability to quickly become productive in large, complex, and unfamiliar codebases while extending them safely.

• Experience working from specifications provided by domain experts.

• Background in platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling work.

• People management experience is not required nor advantageous.

• Attributes such as ownership, autonomy, intellectual honesty, judgment, adaptability, cross-expertise collaboration, communication, disciplined curiosity, and maintaining high standards are essential.

🏝️ Benefits

• Access to cutting-edge models, agentic tools, and infrastructure without procurement obstacles.

• Authority to evaluate, select, and replace the tools and infrastructure utilized by the team.

• A live production agentic platform to inherit and expand upon.

• A principal-level individual contributor pathway with substantial scope and autonomy.

• No requirement to transition into management for career advancement.

• Fully remote and global work opportunities.

• Flexible working hours.

• Asynchronous work environment.

• Regular and meaningful feedback.

• Support in achieving personal career aspirations.

• Access to state-of-the-art tools, playbooks, and technology.

• Opportunities to connect with thought leaders in the field.

• Webinars focusing on the latest technology topics.

• Stipend for home office setup.

• Engaging activities such as coffee chats, happy hours, cooking classes, book clubs, and more.