Sr Software Engineer I (AWS - Hybrid Role)

What You'll Do:

Join Agent Enablement, the team making it easier for Principal engineers to design, build, and ship trustworthy AI agents. We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build the platform, tooling, and guardrails that power the agent-building experience across the organization — using Python, TypeScript, and AWS AgentCore. This space is moving fast, and we're looking for someone who thrives in it: a forward-thinking engineer who brings big ideas to the table, takes ownership, and pushes initiatives forward.

 

Our Engineering Culture

We operate in a product-driven Agile/Lean DevOps environment and have built a culture of innovation and experimentation across our development teams. We work closely with end users and product owners to understand and rapidly respond to emerging business needs, and we believe diversity of thought, background, and perspective is critical to building the best products for our customers.

 

What You'll Do:

As a Senior Software Engineer on Agent Enablement, you'll build the internal platform and developer tooling that other engineering teams rely on to build, test, and operate AI agents. You're not just building agents — you're building what makes it fast, safe, and repeatable for everyone else to build agents too. You'll partner with platform architects, security, and engineering teams across Principal to take tooling from concept to a secure, well-tested, production-grade capability.

 

You'll Have the Opportunity To:

• Own design and solution architecture for your team's work, spanning multiple systems and services.
• Regularly deliver software with a strong design, on time, using the right technology — ensuring we build the right thing the right way.
• Design, build, and operate the agent-builder platform and tooling — SDKs, templates, evaluation harnesses, and guardrails — using Python, TypeScript, AWS, and AWS AgentCore.
• Improve the day-to-day experience of engineers building agents at Principal: faster iteration loops and clearer patterns.
• Understand the tradeoffs between technical, analytical, and product needs, and lead the team toward solutions that account for all of them.
• Be a go-to resource for highly complex technical issues; provide technical advice that influences decisions beyond your own team.
• Create solutions that get reused and socialized across the enterprise (innersource).
• Model strong security practices — secure coding, code analysis, data protection/encryption — and set direction for your team on the controls needed to keep systems secure and compliant.
• Make others better through code review, documentation, technical guidance, and mentoring.
• Consult with business partners on emerging technical trends and directions that support business strategy.

Who You Are:

We are looking for someone with:

• Associate or bachelor’s degree (preference in computer science, technology, engineering or math-related field or equivalent experience) and 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of experience working with AWS services (e.g., Lambda, S3, API Gateway, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and CloudWatch) is required.
• 3+ years of experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (e.g., AWS CDK), and automated testing/security scanning is required.
• Ability to make well-reasoned design decisions and tradeoffs, and to work through unfamiliar code to solve the underlying business problem.
• Track record of identifying and proactively addressing technical debt and risk before it compounds.
• Experience mentoring other engineers through pairing, code review, or design collaboration.
• Experience designing test and evaluation strategies for probabilistic or AI-powered systems, including automated evaluation, regression testing, and production quality measurement.
• Experience designing secure identity, authorization, and tool-access patterns for distributed applications; understands least privilege, delegated access, secrets management, and authorization across service boundaries.
• Experience designing APIs and distributed systems, including authentication, authorization, event-driven architectures, failure handling, resiliency, and observability.

Skills That Will Help You Stand Out:

• Familiarity with AWS AgentCore or other agentic AI/LLM orchestration frameworks.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying cloud-native applications on AWS with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Exposure to prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, or responsible-AI guardrails for LLM-based systems.
• Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or internal platforms - you think about the experience of the engineers who use what you build, not just the end system.
• Familiarity with emerging agent interoperability patterns and protocols such as MCP, tool/function calling, agent-to-service integration, and API-based capability discovery.

Salary Range Information: Salary ranges below reflect targeted base salaries. Non-sales positions have the opportunity to participate in a bonus program. Sales positions are eligible for sales incentives, and in some instances a bonus plan, whereby total compensation may far exceed base salary depending on individual performance. Actual compensation for all roles will be based upon geographic location, work experience, education, licensure requirements and/or skill level and will be finalized at the time of offer. Salary Range: $116000 - $156000 / year Time Off Program: Flexible Time Off (FTO) is provided to salaried (exempt) employees and provides the opportunity to take time away from the office with pay for vacation, personal or short-term illness. Employees don’t accrue a bank of time off under FTO and there is no set number of days provided. Pension Eligible: Yes Additional Information:

Work Environments

This role offers in-office, hybrid (blending at least three office days in a typical workweek). You’ll work with your leader to figure out which option may align best based on several factors.

Work Authorization/Sponsorship

At this time, we're not considering candidates that need any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please use the following links.

Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants

Investment Code of Ethics

For Principal Global Investors positions, you’ll need to follow an Investment Code of Ethics related to personal and business conduct as well as personal trading activities for you and members of your household. These same requirements may also apply to other positions across the organization.

Experience Principal

While our expertise spans the globe, we're bound by one common purpose: to foster a world where financial security is accessible to all. And our success depends on the unique experiences, backgrounds, and talents of our employees – individually and all of us together. Explore our core values, benefits and why we’re an exceptional place to grow your career.

Principal is an Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Posting Window: We will accept applications for 3 full days following the Original Posting Date, after which the posting may remain open or be removed based upon applications received. If we choose to post the job again, we will accept additional applications for at least 1 full day following the Most Recently Posted Date. Please submit applications in a timely manner as there is no guarantee the posting will be available beyond the applicable deadline. Date First Posted (TTF): 10/16/2026 Latest Post Date: Careers - US: 10/16/2026