{"id":2655350,"url":"https://alion.io/job/walkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2","title":"Principal AI Software Engineer","company":{"id":445253,"name":"Walkerdunlop","domain":"walkerdunlop.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/walkerdunlop","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.6,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":43,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":250000,"max":null,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A2A","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Agents SDK","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Reranking","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-15T22:51:12Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T02:54:22Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Department:\nWDTech - R&DWe are Walker & Dunlop. We are one of the largest providers of capital to the commercial real estate industry, enabling real estate owners and operators to bring their visions of communities - where people live, work, shop, and play - to life. We are committed to creating meaningful social, environmental, and economic change in our communities.\nDepartment Overview\nWDTech is W&D’s in-house technology team - a group of collaborative and highly skilled technology professionals, all of whom are leading experts in real estate data, data science, and technology.\nWDTech Engineering builds solutions that impact not only our products but also the people and processes across our organization. A commitment to innovation and a passion for disrupting the old-fashioned real estate industry are our highest priorities.\nThe Impact You Will Have\nAs a Principal AI Software Engineer on our AI Development Team, you will help shape the future of our Loan Origination and Servicing platform and the AI systems that support how we build, deploy, and operate software across the business. You will design scalable applications, intelligent workflows and agentic systems that deliver real-time insights and improve operational efficiency for our teams and clients.\nYou will also contribute to Atlas, our AI collaboration platform that powers reusable skills, agents and AI capabilities across WDTech. This role requires deep technical expertise, sound judgment and the ability to independently solve complex problems, ship reliable solutions and raise the engineering bar through your work and mentorship.\nPrimary Responsibilities\nOwn complex AI and platform initiatives end-to-end, delivering business-facing capabilities while strengthening the underlying context and agent platform. \nDesign, build and maintain agentic workflows for business-critical processes such as loan intake, document review and servicing. \nHelp establish new platform patterns and capabilities by defining approaches, proving them through production use cases and scaling them for broader adoption. \nLead model selection and routing, evaluating models based on cost, latency and quality, and evolving solutions as new models and capabilities become available. \nDesign interfaces and capabilities used by other teams, including MCP tool servers, agent handoffs, subagents, long-running state and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. \nEstablish evaluation and reliability practices, including evaluation sets, LLM-as-judge approaches where appropriate, regression testing and ongoing performance measurement. \nOperate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying risks, making sound technical trade-offs and escalating when needed, while raising the engineering bar through collaboration and mentorship. \nPerform other duties as assigned\nEducation and Experience\n12+ years of software development experience, including experience as a senior individual contributor delivering production systems. \nBachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience. \nExtensive experience delivering production AI/ML systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows. \nDeep experience with modern agent frameworks and SDKs, such as Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph and Pydantic AI, as well as MCP and A2A. \nExperience with prompt and context engineering, including RAG, embeddings, hybrid search and reranking. \nExperience with model evaluation, observability and guardrails for production AI systems. \nExperience using agentic development tools, including skills, subagents and harness configurations. \nExperience in Real Estate, Financial Services or Capital Markets preferred. \nKnowledge, Skills and Abilities\nDeep proficiency in Python and modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI, with a strong focus on scalable and maintainable architecture. \nStrong expertise with SQL databases, including schema design, query optimization and performance tuning. \nExperience testing non-deterministic systems, including LLM call fixtures, evaluation suites and strategies for controlling flaky behavior. \nStrong judgment in determining which capabilities belong within a shared platform versus individual applications. \nAbility to operate effectively in ambiguity, establish emerging patterns and independently move from business problem definition through solution delivery. \nExperience with Event Sourcing and Domain-Driven Design principles. \nExcellent verbal and written communication skills. \nAbility to show ownership of your work, take on challenges and acknowledge growth opportunities, and demonstrate patience when learning new processes \nCourtesy, respect, and thoughtfulness in teaming with colleagues and other stakeholders \nThis position has an estimated base salary of $250,000 - $300,000 plus a discretionary bonus. An employment offer is based on the applicant’s relevant work experience, applicable knowledge, skills, abilities, internal equity, and alignment with market data.\nWhat We Offer\nThe opportunity to join one of Fortune Magazine’s Great Places to Work winners\n\nComprehensive benefit options* that have earned Walker & Dunlop the gold level of the 2025 Cigna Healthy Workforce Designation™, some of which include: - Up to 83% subsidized medical payroll deductions - Competitive dental and vision benefits - 401(k) + match - Pre-tax transit and commuting benefits - A robust health and wellness program - earn cash rewards and gain access to resources that promote health, engagement, and balance - Paid maternity and parental leave, as well as other family paid leave programs - Company-paid life, short and long-term disability insurance - Health Savings Account and Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending\n\nCareer development opportunities\n\nEmpowerment and encouragement to give back - volunteer hours and donation matching\n\n*Eligibility may vary based on average number of hours worked\nEqual Employment Opportunity Statement\nWe are committed to equity in all steps of the recruitment and employment experience. We believe in equal access to opportunities in our workplace. We do not tolerate discrimination, including harassment, based on any characteristic protected by applicable law, such as race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, sex, age, disability, veteran or military status, and genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We strive to be a safe place to ask questions, build professional relationships, and develop careers.\nSPAM\nPlease be wary of recruitment scams. An indication of a scam might be a request for sensitive or bank information at the time of application or emails coming from a non walkerdunlop.com email address. Please call us at 301.215.5500, if you have any concerns about information requested during or after the application process.\nFair Chance Hiring\nBackground checks, including any questions related to infractions, arrests, or conviction records, will not be conducted until after a conditional offer of employment has been accepted. We will consider for employment qualified applicants regardless of arrest and conviction records, in accordance with federal, state, and local laws.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7244,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Growth opportunities","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Real Estate","Commercial Real Estate","Asset Management & Funds","Mortgage Lending & Brokers"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T22:51:12Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1","filings_12m":1,"filings_prev_12m":3,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":172500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":43,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/walkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/walkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T09:51:18Z","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":8116,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"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":445253},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=445253"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fwalkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2"},{"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%2Fwalkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2"},{"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%2Fwalkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2"},{"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/walkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fwalkerdunlop-principal-ai-software-engineer-2"}]}