{"id":2198069,"url":"https://alion.io/job/dell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering","title":"Software Principal Engineer / Autonomous AI Software Engineering","company":{"id":89,"name":"Dell Technologies","domain":"dell.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/dell-technologies","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":100,"open_postings":83,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.06,"repost_share":0.072,"time_to_fill_p50_days":3,"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Hopkinton, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":172000,"max":236500,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":236500},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":true},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-09T19:13:04Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T17:48:42Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"Software Principal Engineer - Autonomous AI Software Engineering\nSoftware engineering is being reshaped by autonomous AI agents that can plan, write, test, and review code with increasing independence. Our team works at the forefront of that shift, bringing agent-driven autonomy into the software development lifecycle so that engineers set direction and make key decisions while agents handle more execution.\nBecause the agent landscape evolves rapidly, we stay hands-on: exploring the most promising approaches, proving them with rigorous experiments on real engineering work, and turning successful patterns into standard development practices. We are a small, AI-native team operating like a startup-prioritizing high autonomy, rapid experimentation, and daily human-AI collaboration.\nJoin us to do the best work of your career and make a profound impact as a Software Principal Engineer on our AI Governance Engineering team in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. This is an onsite role.\nWhat You'll Achieve\nYou will be the hands-on engineer who turns autonomous agents from impressive demos into dependable engineering practice. You will set up and run proofs of concept of agent platforms and approaches against real codebases and tasks, measure objectively what they can and cannot do, and integrate viable solutions into our development lifecycle-operating within the architecture and evaluation framework defined by our architect.\nYou will spend most of your time building and experimenting (70%+), using AI agents as a core part of your daily workflow.\n Key Responsibilities:\nRun hands-on proofs of concept and pilots of autonomous software-engineering agents and agent platforms, from environment setup and integration through results, on representative real-world engineering work\nBuild evaluation harnesses: realistic task suites, benchmarks, and metrics for output quality, level of autonomy, reliability, speed, cost, and security, enabling fair and repeatable comparisons\nVerify and validate agent output using automated tests, mutation testing, static and security analysis, acceptance-criteria checks, and calibrated human review to identify failure points\nIntegrate agents into the engineering toolchain (source control, CI/CD, issue tracking, specifications, and quality gates) via APIs, MCP, and custom tools, building extensions where standard solutions fall short\nIncrease autonomy safely by implementing guardrails, sandboxing, observability (traces and replay), and feedback loops, helping engineering teams adopt agent-driven workflows with confidence\nTechnologies You'll Work With:\n Agents and LLMs: Commercial and open-source autonomous coding agents, agent frameworks, frontier and open-weight models, LLM gateways, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)\nEngineering: Python, TypeScript / Node.js, REST and GraphQL APIs, Git-based workflows, and CI/CD pipelines\n Verification and Validation: Automated test frameworks, test-driven development (TDD), mutation and property-based testing, static and security analysis, and LLM evaluation frameworks\nRuntime and Observability: Docker and Kubernetes for sandboxed agent execution, OpenTelemetry tracing, metrics, dashboards, and PostgreSQL\nTake the First Step Towards Your Dream Career\nEvery Dell Technologies team member brings something unique to the table. Here is what we are looking for with this role:\nEssential Requirements:\n8+ years of software engineering experience;. Ability to thrive in an AI-native, startup-style team where ambiguity is normal and execution speed matters\nProven track record of building core components of an autonomous agent platform in production (e.g., agent execution loops, planning and task decomposition, tool-calling/MCP layers, or memory and context management). Building simple LLM API wrappers or using commercial coding assistants alone is not sufficient\nExperience operating long-running autonomous agents in production: isolated sandbox environments (containers or microVMs), state checkpointing/resume, failure recovery, loop and drift detection, and token/cost budgets\nDeep expertise in context engineering for software agents on large, complex codebases: code indexing and retrieval, repository maps, and context compaction, with measurable improvements in task success rates\nExperience with evaluation-driven agent development: designing benchmarks and evaluation suites to measure task completion, iterating on agent behavior based on metrics, and enforcing automated verification\nDesirable Requirements:\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience\nExperience deploying, extending, or integrating commercial or open-source autonomous agent platforms in an enterprise environment (including custom agents, SDK/MCP extensions, and self-hosted/private deployments)\nProduction experience with multi-agent systems (planner, executor, and reviewer patterns; agent handoffs), durable execution engines, published agent benchmarks, or contributions to open-source agent frameworks\nAbout Dell Technologies - ISG Developer Experience\nDell's Infrastructure Solutions Group is a global leader in Solutions, Storage, Compute, and Networking. The Developer Experience organization within ISG is responsible for developer productivity, tooling, observability, and platform engineering for approximately 9,000 engineers. Our current mandate spans agentic SDLC transformation, AI tooling governance, and the operating model changes required to make AI-assisted development the norm - not the exception.\nInfrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) builds the products that power infrastructure, solutions, and data management our customers need most. Our teams design and develop the hardware and software that connect infrastructure, accelerate computational workloads, integrate across the stack, protect data continuity, and deliver the platforms, applications, and diagnostics our customers rely on every day at enterprise scale.\nSome product builders follow the rules. Ours rewrite them.\nWithin ISG, innovation isn't just about creating new technology- it's about challenging assumptions and reimagining how work gets done. Engineers define intent, author precise specifications, and orchestrate AI agents that execute at speed and scale. AI is embedded throughout our development process, helping us move faster, learn quicker, and deliver greater impact. Yet the most important contribution remains uniquely human: deciding what to build, designing how it should work, and applying the judgment needed to earn our customers' trust. When your products power critical infrastructure around the world, that responsibility matters.\nWe move quickly toward the work that matters most. We reward experimentation, encourage bold thinking, and remove unnecessary barriers so great ideas can become reality faster. Our teams embrace a customer-first, first-to-market mindset, transforming rapid feedback into better products and better outcomes. We aren't looking for people who are content with the status quo- we look for builders who question it, improve it, and occasionally rewrite it.\nIf you're energized by solving complex systems challenges, excited to work alongside AI to amplify your impact, and motivated by the opportunity to shape what's next instead of simply maintaining what's been done before, you'll find your place here.\nJoin us and help build the future of enterprise technology.\nCompensation\nDell is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range for this position is $172,000 to $236,500\nBenefits and Perks of Working at Dell Technologies\nYour life. Your health. Supported by your benefits. You can explore the overall benefits experience that awaits you as a Dell Technologies team member - right now at MyWellatDell.com","description_format":"text","description_chars":7842,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Enterprise Storage Systems","Servers & Data Center Hardware","Laptops"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-09T20:13:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":40,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.731,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":3,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:tail","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":236500,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/dell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/dell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-13T20:20:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":31274,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":89},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=89"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/dell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdell-technologies-software-principal-engineer-autonomous-ai-software-engineering"}]}