Principal Software Engineer

Be the one building AI-powered experiences where they matter most.
At Genesys, we help organizations create better customer experiences through AI-powered experience orchestration. Our platform connects people, systems, data and AI to help organizations deliver more personalized service, improve operational efficiency and build stronger customer relationships.
Help build, support and operate technology used by more than 8,000 organizations in over 100 countries – moving AI from possibility to production in real-world enterprise environments every day.
The Genesys Digital & AI group builds the innovations that power customer experiences for 8,000+ organisations worldwide. As a Principal Engineer you’ll design and evolve the backend platforms that make our Agentic AI products possible. You’ll own the technical strategy for core services, data, and runtime foundations; partner closely with Agentic AI specialists; and lead multiple teams to deliver secure, reliable, low‑latency systems at global scale.
Location: This role is open to candidates who wish to work in a hybrid capacity from our Galway office or remotely within Ireland. Please note that the team collaborates regularly in our Galway office, and remote employees will be expected to attend in person a minimum of 2–3 times per month.
What You Will Do:
Own the multi‑year backend strategy. Define north‑star architectures for APIs, data flows, events/streams, storage, consistency, and multi‑tenant isolation that underpin Agentic AI workloads.
Standardise service templates, libraries, REST/event patterns, schema versioning, automated testing, and documentation that accelerates multiple teams.
Design for scale, reliability, and cost. Drive SLOs/SLA design, capacity planning, graceful degradation, performance engineering, and cost/stewardship for traffic and LLM‑adjacent workloads.
Comply with Data platform & governance rules. Shape ingestion, transformation and cataloguing; ensure lineage, retention, residency and privacy‑by‑design; make data easy to use and hard to misuse.
Ensure operational excellence. Lead CI/CD, IaC, progressive delivery, runtime hardening, observability and on‑call practices; turn incidents into systemic fixes.
Put security first. Champion threat modelling, least‑privilege IAM, secrets management, API authz/authn, and compliance controls.
Partner with AI specialists. Co‑design interfaces, contracts and back‑pressure strategies for agents, RAG, tool calling and eval loops; hide complexity behind stable, well‑documented APIs.
Lead major programmes. Cross‑team migrations, region expansion, service architecture, eventing upgrades, tech debt reduction and deprecations.
Influence through writing and reviews. Review PR’s, give constructive feedback, create/update high level architecture docs; communicate decision trade‑offs clearly to engineers, PMs and execs.
Multiply talent. Coach Staff Engineers and tech leads; raise the bar on design, code quality and operational maturity across multiple teams.
What We're Looking For:
Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or related disciplines.
8+ years building and operating backend / platform software, with evidence of technical leadership and impact across teams.
Deep skill in Java and/or Python, and strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures and distributed-systems design.
Proven experience with event‑driven and service‑oriented architectures (e.g., Kafka/Kinesis/SQS; REST APIs), schema evolution, idempotency, and backwards‑compatible APIs.
Expertise running on AWS at scale (IAM, networking, DynamoDB/RDS, S3, ECS/serverless, CloudWatch/OpenTelemetry) and modern DevOps/SRE (CI/CD, IaC, automated testing, runbooks).
Track record of setting standards and unblocking/aligning multiple teams via influence; excellent communicator who maps technical choices to business outcomes.
Evidence of performance and cost optimisation in latency‑sensitive, high‑throughput systems (profiling, caching, load shedding, rate limiting, async pipelines).
Comfortable partnering with AI/ML teams and supporting LLM‑adjacent systems (feature stores, vector stores, evaluation harnesses, safety/guardrails) even if you’re not the model expert.
Pragmatism, bias to action, and a growth mindset.
Demonstrates awareness of AI-enabled systems and associated risks and responsibilities, applying appropriate technical practices to support secure, reliable, and responsible AI system behaviour.
Desirable Experience or Appetite to Learn:
Analytics and data science frameworks/technologies, e.g. Apache Spark, Pandas.
Machine learning concepts and frameworks.
LLM systems concepts (tooling, retrieval, evals) and cost/latency trade‑offs.
Security, privacy and governance of enterprise software.
Our Benefits:
At Genesys, we’re committed to supporting your well-being, growth, and work–life balance. Our comprehensive benefits package includes:
Flexible work options – Choose what works for you with hybrid schedules, work-from-home flexibility, and the option to collaborate onsite in our state-of-the-art Galway office.
Career development & growth – Access continuous learning opportunities, mentoring, and clear paths for advancement.
Competitive pension scheme – Invest in your future with an excellent employer-supported pension plan.
Annual bonus program – Be rewarded for your impact and contributions.
Comprehensive health coverage – Including private health insurance, access to company dental plan, and wellness supports.
Financial protection – Enjoy Income Protection and Life Assurance, along with access to dedicated financial planning resources to help you make confident, informed decisions about your future.
Family-friendly policies – Generous paid maternity and paternity
#LI-MC1
Working at Genesys
AI at enterprise scale – Build, support and operate AI-powered technology used by more than 8,000 organizations worldwide. 150+ new AI features were released in the last fiscal year.
A flexible-first culture – Join a global team of nearly 7,000 employees with flexible ways of working designed to help people do their best work.
Growth in the AI era – Build future-ready skills through mentorship, learning programs, leadership development and education support.
Time to recharge and give back – Benefits include paid volunteer time, August Free Fridays, well-being resources and regionally tailored programs for employees and their families.
Recognized globally – Genesys is Great Place to Work® certified in 17 countries and 94% of employees are proud to tell others they work at Genesys.
Learn more about our culture, AI innovation and sustainability commitments through our Careers site and Sustainability Report.
What Happens After You Apply
After you apply, here's what you can typically expect:
Our Talent Acquisition team reviews your application with the hiring team.
A Talent Acquisition Partner will review your application and, if your background is aligned, schedule a Zoom interview.
Next, you'll meet the hiring manager and other members of the interview team.
We aim to keep the process focused and respectful of your time, with no more than five interviews in most cases.
After interviews are complete, our team will follow up with the final steps.
Every application is reviewed by a person. Response times may vary by role and location, but our team will keep you informed throughout the process.
Stay Connected
Stay connected to learn more about how we're applying AI to customer and employee experience challenges and get notified when relevant opportunities become available.