Principal Software Engineer - Executive Director

Lead a small, high-impact engineering team that reimagines developer workflows for an agentic world — building agents that act across platforms, co-developing agent-friendly interfaces and eliminating processes designed around manual human coordination.
AI coding assistants have changed how developers write code. The next frontier is the work around it: environment setup, compliance evidence, deployment and coordination. This team will reimagine those workflows for an agentic world — not put a chatbot in front of existing processes. Developers express an outcome; agents act across platforms to deliver it, with appropriate controls and human approval.
As an Executive Director within Cloud Foundational Services in Infrastructure Platforms at JPMorgan Chase, you will lead a four-person team, including yourself, with senior sponsorship to eliminate unnecessary steps and ship agentic solutions into production. This is a hands-on delivery role: you will own strategy, make architecture decisions and co-build agent-friendly interfaces with platform teams.
Your first deliverable will be an agentic cloud platform onboarding assistant. Within the first 90 days, you will baseline the workflow and deliver a bounded production capability, establishing patterns for expansion into provisioning, compliance evidence and change management. Further scope will be driven by demonstrated impact.
Job Responsibilities
Own the strategy and delivery roadmap for agentic developer workflow acceleration across Cloud Foundational Services, prioritising observed workflow friction, end-to-end lead time, developer effort, failure rates and risk.
Reimagine workflows with developers, platform owners and control partners around agent-led execution, challenging which steps and hand-offs remain necessary while preserving required control outcomes.
Drive cross-organisational delivery by contributing design, code and testing to partner teams’ APIs and tool interfaces so agents can discover capabilities, invoke actions and verify results, rather than simply raising requirements.
Set the technical direction for agentic systems: orchestration, context and tool integration, evaluation, reliable execution and the boundary between agent decisions, deterministic operations and human judgement.
Baseline the initial cloud onboarding workflow and deliver a tightly scoped production agentic assistant within the first 90 days, with clear success criteria and an agreed delivery plan.
Build and lead a four-person team comprising yourself, two VP engineers and one Associate engineer, establishing engineering culture, delivery cadence and quality standards.
Establish safe operating boundaries for agents, including identity and least-privilege permissions, auditable actions, appropriate approval points, protection against unsafe tool use, failure recovery and clear operational ownership.
Measure impact against a baseline, including lead time, developer effort, task success, adoption, error rates and ongoing operating cost, with monthly sponsor updates and quarterly leadership checkpoints.
Maintain hands-on technical involvement through design and code reviews, architecture decisions and direct support to unblock delivery.
Establish a continuous developer feedback channel so priorities remain grounded in real workflows and user needs.
Build an evidence-based case for expanding the team’s scope and capacity as results demonstrate value.
Required Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills
Significant hands-on software development experience with a track record of progressing into engineering leadership while staying technically current: reading code, reviewing designs and diagnosing production issues.
A track record of delivering change across organisational boundaries through influence, evidence and persistence, including initiatives requiring multiple teams to evolve their systems or ways of working.
Deep technical credibility in cloud infrastructure and platform automation, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, identity and access management, and distributed systems. Our environment includes AWS, Terraform and Kubernetes.
Hands-on experience building, or technically leading the delivery of, agentic AI systems that use tools and take actions across systems, handle failures and operate within defined controls — beyond chatbots, summaries or code generation alone.
Experience decomposing large, ambiguous problems into phased delivery plans with measurable outcomes and explicit dependencies.
Strong systems thinking across interfaces, contracts, failure modes, operational ownership and the organisational dynamics of cross-platform change.
Experience operating with senior stakeholder visibility, defending prioritisation decisions and declining scope that would dilute delivery impact.
Clear, direct communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
A security-first mindset, integrating risk and compliance judgement throughout design, delivery and operation.
Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills
Experience operating agentic AI systems in production at enterprise scale, including evaluation, observability, agent identity, permission boundaries and human-in-the-loop patterns.
Experience in regulated or large-scale enterprise environments where compliance, change management and auditability are essential.
A track record of reducing operational toil and manual effort through automation at scale.
Experience co-developing solutions with other teams, including contributions to their codebases and platform interfaces.
Demonstrated ability to quantify engineering improvements and communicate their value in business terms.
Experience building or operating developer platforms, internal tooling or infrastructure-as-a-service.
Experience defining the scope, approach and success criteria for greenfield engineering initiatives.

Skills
AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Onboarding