Principal Software Engineer

What You'll Do

Design & Build Agentic Systems

• Architect and deliver agentic systems that implement sense → think → act loops: systems that plan, execute, evaluate, and iterate toward outcomes
• Drive the engineering organization beyond prompt-response patterns to multi-step, autonomous workflows that solve real business problems at scale
• Engineer AI-driven workflows where AI takes action, produces measurable output, and improves through iteration and feedback

Set Standards for AI-Native Development

• Define how engineers use AI-assisted development tools, including code generation, prompt engineering, workflow orchestration, and agentic frameworks, as a team-wide engineering discipline
• Establish and evolve standards for AI-native systems: how they handle nondeterminism, manage state across multi-step processes, maintain observability, and control inference cost and latency
• Define testing and validation approaches for adaptive systems where behavior is not fully deterministic; hold the quality bar for production AI systems across reliability, latency, and correctness
• Serve as the engineering organization's authority on AI-native development practices and drive their adoption across teams

Build Reusable Foundations

• Design and deliver frameworks, integration patterns, and technical capabilities that reduce the cost of building every subsequent solution
• Apply the principle "fix the process, don't automate the broken one" as a design mandate: identify root causes and address them, not symptoms
• Remain a hands-on practitioner: write clean, testable, maintainable code and hold the team to that standard through rigorous code review

Lead & Grow the Organization

• Collaborate across engineering, product, and operations to share what's working, surface what isn't, and help AI-native practices take hold organically
• Contribute to how Vestmark thinks about building AI-native software, through design reviews, architecture discussions, and hands-on collaboration
• Share what you know freely, whether that's pairing on a hard problem, reviewing a design, or helping a teammate get more out of their AI tooling

What We're Looking For

Core Engineering Excellence

• Demonstrated expertise building and delivering complex, production-grade software systems: platforms and frameworks that other teams depend on at scale
• Strong fundamentals across the full engineering lifecycle: architecture, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations
• Comfort designing systems where behavior is non-deterministic and may evolve over time, as a core competency
• Experience with AWS or equivalent cloud-native environments, CI/CD pipelines, and modern deployment patterns

Agentic Engineering & AI Expertise

• Proven, hands-on experience building agentic systems: multi-step, autonomous workflows where AI plans, reasons, acts, and iterates in production environments
• Deep practical knowledge of LLM integration: context management, tool use, orchestration, and state management across multi-step processes
• AI-assisted development tools are a consistent, intentional part of your daily engineering practice
• A clear, defensible point of view on how AI is reshaping software engineering and where it is heading, backed by a track record of delivery
• Understanding of how AI systems interact with data, services, external tools, and real-world operational constraints
• Awareness of the trade-offs unique to AI-native systems, including cost of inference, latency, observability, and reliability
• Experience designing feedback loops where systems improve through usage, data, and iteration

Independence & Technical Leadership

• Track record of setting technical direction that others have adopted: patterns, methodologies, or architectural decisions that outlasted individual projects and spread across teams
• Ability to engage with ambiguous, real-world business problems: understand the process, identify the waste, and determine the right solution before writing a line of code
• Built deep expertise through independent study, experimentation, and delivery

What Will Help You Stand Out

• Hands-on experience delivering at least one production agentic system where AI orchestrates multi-step workflows with real autonomy and demonstrable business impact
• Experience building platform or framework-level tooling consumed by other engineering teams at scale
• Background in financial services technology, particularly wealth management operations, portfolio management, or trading systems
• Demonstrated work at the intersection of technical depth and business outcomes

Education & Experience

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• Typically 12+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; 8+ years with a Master's degree; or equivalent demonstrated expertise
• A sustained track record at the Principal or equivalent senior IC level, with evidence of technical direction that extended beyond individual projects

Compensation & Benefits

• Market-based compensation approach
• Equity-based grants for all new hires
• Company-paid medical premiums of 90%
• Competitive time-off program
• Other variable compensation, if eligible