Principal Software Engineer

Ignite Your Future:
As an Engineering Manager at QAD, you will lead an agile engineering team responsible for designing, building, and delivering high‑quality software. You will combine hands‑on technical understanding with people leadership, helping engineers do their best work while delivering meaningful business outcomes.
Active use of AI-native development workflows — Cursor, Claude Code, and CodeRabbit or equivalent — is a baseline requirement, not a nice-to-have. We treat AI augmentation as the standard engineering operating model. Leaders are expected to use these tools personally, set norms for their teams, and demonstrate that AI tooling raises the output of their entire squad. Candidates who view AI tools as optional or experimental are not the right fit for this organization.
The Mission: What You'll Be Building
You will guide a team building features and services across QAD’s adaptive, cloud‑native platform, contributing directly to customer‑facing capabilities and platform foundations.
Lead for the engine room of ERA — the runtime infrastructure that autonomous agents execute on.
Your Impact/ What you will be doing:
Deliver the Orchestrator, Reasoning Engine, Agent Runtime, and Session/Memory Management systems
Own the LLM Gateway: model routing, cost governance, latency SLOs, prompt versioning, and model fallback
Ensure production reliability: agent sandboxing, execution audit trails, timeout handling, and retry logic
Manage a squad of 5 engineers, including 1 Principal Engineer
What we are looking for
6+ years in backend or AI/ML engineering with at least 2 years managing a squad
Experience operating production LLM systems — real SLOs, real failure modes, real post-mortems
Deep understanding of agentic frameworks: orchestration patterns, tool use, and multi-step reasoning
MCP (Model Context Protocol) implementation experience
Prompt versioning, eval pipeline design, and agent behavior testing
Responsible AI guardrails and agent safety architecture
The Mindset:
People-Centered Leader: Cares deeply about team health, growth, and inclusion.
Execution-Oriented: Focuses on delivering value consistently and reliably.
Technically Curious: Continuously builds technical depth to better support the team.
Accountable Owner: Takes responsibility for commitments and outcomes.
Collaborative: Works openly with Product, QA, and peer teams.

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
No