# Principal Software Engineer

**Company:** [Vestmark](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/vestmark)
**Location:** Boston, MA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $160k – $190k/yr
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Python, Java, AWS, LLMs, Agentic Systems, CI/CD, Prompt Engineering, System Architecture, Observability, Testing Frameworks
**Posted:** 2026-05-27

> Principal Engineer to architect and deliver production agentic AI systems, define AI-native development standards, and build reusable frameworks for wealth management technology at scale.

## Job Description

## 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

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