Staff/Principal Product Engineer (AI-Native Builder)

Traditional engineering roles hand you a task and ask you to implement it. This one hands you a problem and a fleet of AI agents and asks you to ship the solution. 

The Product Engineer / Builder  is a Staff/Principal level individual contributor role, for someone who takes a defined problem and owns the solution end to end. You understand the customer and the problem, then design, build, and ship working software, using AI agents as your primary means of turning direction into product. You combine deep engineering craft with genuine product instinct, and act as a force multiplier rather than a single pair of hands.  

How You’ll Work  

Given a problem to solve, you shape the approach and use AI to bring it to life by directing several AI agents in parallel and rigorously reviewing what they produce. An idea sketched in the morning can be a functional prototype by lunch and a working product by the end of the week. You think like a product manager, care like a designer, and build like an engineer. 

This is not a role for someone who waits to be told exactly what to type.  

You bring taste and judgment to every decision. It’s your responsibility to know what to build, what not to build, and to prove - through evals, testing, and review - that AI-generated work is reliable enough to ship. You measure success in customer and business outcomes, not tasks completed. 

Build on What Works, Invent Where It Counts  

Build rapidly by composing solutions from the best available tools, whether internal or external, and apply your own innovation where it matters most. That means drawing on proven platforms, components, services, and models instead of building everything from scratch, then adding original thinking where there are gaps to close, experiences to elevate, or clear opportunities to differentiate. You know when to leverage what already works, when to extend it, and when to reinvent a piece entirely - always with the goal of creating meaningful product advantage, not just more code. 

Setting the Bar for AI-Native Engineering  

As Diligent accelerates its transformation into an AI-native organization, you set the standard for what AI-native engineering looks like in a regulated, security- and compliance-conscious environment. You establish the patterns, prompts, evals, and guardrails that colleagues reuse, and you raise the leverage of every team you touch. You uphold Diligent’s bar for quality, security, and compliance, making sure AI-native work meets the standards our customers rely on. 

These are the essentials you’ll need to get an interview:  

Apply if you…  

• Have a track record of driving complex products end to end - building and shipping reliable, production-grade software with visible impact  

• Have strong full-stack engineering fundamentals and the judgment and experience to make sound architectural calls 

• Have an integrator’s mindset: you see how the pieces fit together, favor proven building blocks over reinventing them, and design so your work compounds across teams rather than being rebuilt 

• Are genuinely fluent with modern AI tools and agents, including running several agents in parallel, context-switching between them without losing thread state, knowing when to intervene, composing them into pipelines and picking the right model or tool for a given task 

• Can evaluate AI output with engineering rigor, spotting where it breaks and knowing when it’s reliable enough to ship 

• Have strong product intuition and are comfortable talking directly to customers and users, taking projects from brief to completion 

• Have a bias to ship: you thrive in ambiguity, pick up dropped balls, and move outcomes rather than tasks 

• Care deeply about quality, security, and reliability 

• Communicate clearly, and can explain not just what you built, but why it matters 

• Lift the people around you by mentoring engineers, sharing what works, and multiplying the output of every team you touch 

• Have defined AI-native engineering practices, evals, or internal tooling that other teams went on to adopt 

• Have designed or orchestrated multi-agent workflows successfully 

• Can point to things you’ve built and shipped - side projects very much count 

About Us

Diligent is the AI leader in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) SaaS solutions, helping more than 1 million users and 700,000 board members to clarify risk and elevate governance. The Diligent One Platform gives practitioners, the C-Suite and the board a consolidated view of their entire GRC practice so they can more effectively manage risk, build greater resilience and make better decisions, faster. 

At Diligent, we're building the future with people who think boldly and move fast.  Whether you're designing systems that leverage large language models or part of a team reimaging workflows with AI, you'll help us unlock entirely new ways of working and thinking.  Curiosity is in our DNA, we look for individuals willing to ask the big questions and experiment fearlessly - those who embrace change not as a challenge, but as an opportunity.  The future belongs to those who keep learning, and we are building it together.  At Diligent, you’re not just building the future - you’re an agent of positive change, joining a global community on a mission to make an impact.

Learn more at diligent.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook

What Diligent Offers You  

• Creativity is ingrained in our culture. We are innovative collaborators by nature. We thrive in exploring how things can be differently both in our internal processes and to help our clients
• We care about our people.  Diligent offers a flexible work environment, global days of service, comprehensive health benefits, meeting free days, generous time off policy and wellness programs to name a few
• We have teams all over the world. We may be headquartered in New York City, but we have office hubs in Washington D.C., Vancouver, London, Galway, Budapest, Munich, Bengaluru, Singapore, and Sydney.
• Diversity is important to us. Growing, maintaining and promoting a diverse team is a top priority for us. We foster and encourage diversity through our Employee Resource Groups and provide access to resources and education to support the education of our team, facilitate dialogue, and foster understanding.

Diligent created the modern governance movement. Our world-changing idea is to empower leaders with the technology, insights and connections they need to drive greater impact and accountability - to lead with purpose. Our employees are passionate, smart, and creative people who not only want to help build the software company of the future, but who want to make the world a more sustainable, equitable and better place. 

Headquartered in New York, Diligent has offices in Washington D.C.,  London, Galway, Budapest, Vancouver, Bengaluru, Munich, Singapore and Sydney.  To foster strong collaboration and connection, this role will follow a hybrid work model. If you are within a commuting distance to one of our Diligent office locations, you will be expected to  work onsite at least 50% of the time.  We believe that in-person engagement helps drive innovation, teamwork, and a strong sense of community.

Diligent is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy, childbirth, physical disability, mental disability, age, military status, protected veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner or civil union status, gender (including sex stereotyping and gender identity or expression), medical condition (including, but not limited to, cancer related or HIV/AIDS related), genetic information, or sexual orientation in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Diligent's EEO Policy  and US EEOC’s Know Your Rights. We are a drug free workplace. 

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected]. 

To support a fair and consistent hiring process, we use AI and digital automated tools to assist our recruitment team in organizing candidate data, surfacing relevant applications, coordinating interview scheduling and summarizing interview notes. All final screening, evaluation, and hiring decisions are made by humans on our team. To learn more about how we collect, protect, and process your information, please review our Candidate Privacy Policy.  

At Diligent, we recognize the value of a diverse global workforce. Visa sponsorship may be available for select positions based on business needs and specific role requirements. Sponsorship decisions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and eligibility should not be assumed for all opportunities. 

Recruitment agencies: Diligent does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Diligent employees or any other organization location. Diligent is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes