'Principal Engineer, AI Commerce Platform'

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Principal Engineer, AI Commerce Platform

Thresh Consulting — Strategy in Action for the AI Era

Salary: $200,000 - $250,000 + 30% performance-based bonus

Location: NYC, Chicago, Denver preferred | Hybrid with travel flexibility

ABOUT THRESH

Thresh Consulting is a modern digital consulting firm built for the AI era—where strategy, execution, and craft come together to deliver real outcomes with speed. Our specialty is helping organizations design, build, and scale digital products that create exceptional customer experiences and drive value.

ROLE OVERVIEW

Thresh is hiring a Principal Engineer to lead the full-stack build of a first-of-its-kind AI commerce infrastructure. You'll own the technical design and build of a platform layer that connects a large enterprise's commerce systems to AI agents and conversational surfaces. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you'll architect, build, and ship production-grade infrastructure intended to set the standard for AI commerce in a regulated, high-complexity industry.

The role reports to Thresh leadership and operates alongside engineering executives at a Fortune 100 organization. The work is technically ambitious, strategically consequential, and highly visible at the executive level

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• The MCP foundation — multi-tenant from day one, model-agnostic by design, with the schema and primitives that determine the standard for AI commerce in this industry
• The agentic interaction layer — tool design, capability discovery, conversational state, latency budgets, and the failure modes that emerge when LLMs are calling production commerce systems in real time.
• Protocol-level work — the technical voice on how MCP, ACP, UCP, and whatever comes next converge. You'll make the calls about which protocols to embrace, which to abstract over, and how the platform stays durable as the standards evolve.
• Full-stack execution — deep integration with the client's commerce stack on one side, and the conversational surfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini, the client's own properties) consumers actually interact with on the other. You're comfortable across the whole arc.

WHAT YOU BRING

• Demonstrated experience designing and shipping APIs that other teams or organizations depend on in production. Strong working knowledge of schema design, versioning, idempotency, and deprecation practices.
• A track record of shipping LLM-native systems in production environments — tool use, function calling, agentic flows — with attention to reliability, latency, and failure modes beyond proof-of-concept.
• A platform-oriented engineering mindset. Designs abstractions intended to support multiple consumers and use cases, including ones not yet defined at build time.
• Experience in regulated environments (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR) where compliance is implemented as part of the system architecture rather than enforced through external review.
• Effectiveness in joint-build models with client or partner engineering teams, including navigating external architecture review processes and providing technical pushback when warranted.
• Senior-level judgment in technical decision-making. Able to defend a position when the evidence supports it, revise a position when new information warrants, and communicate clearly with executive, peer, and engineering audiences

PREFERRED SKILLS

• Direct, implementation-level experience with structured tool-use protocols.
• Experience in industries requiring complex logic (eligibility, address-keyed availability, multi-step provisioning).
• Experience standing up developer-facing platforms (SDKs, docs, and versioning policy).
• Hands-on experience building against LLM SDKs in (OpenAI Apps SDK, Anthropic Messages API, Google Gemini SDK, or equivalents)
• Track record of building or scaling an engineering team's technical bar, not just shipping individual projects.
• Comfort being client-facing with senior stakeholders and external partners.

WHY THRESH

• Competitive compensation with bonus eligibility.
• Healthcare benefits and 401(k) with company match.
• Opportunity to work on modern, high-impact products utilizing cutting-edge AI-assisted development tools.
• Clear growth path and mentorship from senior engineering leaders.
• A culture that values craft, clarity, and teamwork.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Individual salaries that are offered to a candidate are determined after consideration of numerous factors including internal equity, market data, the candidate’s qualifications- including but not limited to specialty skills, prior relevant industry experience, relevant degrees or certifications. The salary range estimate below is inclusive of all departments, and offered salaries may vary within the given range between departments. A reasonable estimate of the base salary range for this level is $200,000 to $250,000 annualized and other competitive benefits.

Must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

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