Principal Engineer, AI Native Quality & Safety

At Workiva, we build and scale an enterprise platform that powers complex financial reporting, compliance, and collaboration for some of the world’s largest organizations. We solve for high-throughput data, strict consistency, and architectural scale while exploring what AI can do to transform how engineering teams work.

We are not simply adding AI to existing workflows. We are redesigning how engineering gets done. As agents take on more of the work, the human review steps that once caught problems are going away. AI failures often happen when nothing breaks: the model does exactly what it was asked, and the result is still wrong. That makes safety a control problem, not a prediction problem.

We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to lead quality and safety for AI-native delivery. Our standard is quality through systems, not heroics, so the safe path is the easy path and higher velocity never means higher production risk. This is a hands-on role for someone who can define strategy, propose original solutions, and raise the technical bar for the teams around them.

What You’ll Do

Deliver outcomes

• Partner with engineering, platform, InfoSec, SRE, and Compliance teams to build layered safety controls, so systems stay safe even when multiple safeguards fail.
• Build pre-production verification, including evals, invariant tests, and risk-based test selection under a non-skippable invariant floor.
• Build automated safety valves into development and delivery, so safety does not depend on slow human review.

Define and drive technical strategy

• Lead the “Ratify Continuously, Expose Deliberately” model: continuous shadow soak, ratified releases, and deliberate per-tenant exposure.
• Define the invariants our systems must never violate, and design controls that make those states unreachable.
• Build Agentic Systems to remove CI bottlenecks by quarantining flaky tests and moving full suites to nightly runs.
• Frame ambiguous safety problems and propose original approaches to solve them.
• Increase agent autonomy only as verification improves.
• Risk based evaluation approval of PRs

Design AI-driven systems

• Enforce integrity-protected channels, where authorization comes only from signed sources and permission brokers, and all agent inputs and tool outputs are treated as data.
• Ensure agents have zero authority over the guardrails that constrain them, such as CI gates, branch protection, and audit loggers.
• Require privileged actuators to independently verify an agent’s claims about environment, approvals, and test status before acting.
• Test, monitor, and observe AI models in real environments, with containment and rollback when behavior is unsafe.

Influence and lead

• Raise the technical bar by making quality the default rather than the result of heroics.
• Mentor and challenge Staff+ engineers to expand their scope, judgment, and impact.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to balance velocity with production risk.
• Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others.
• Contribute across product domains, bringing context from one area to solve problems in another.

What You’ll Need

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and scaling complex software systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field; or 6+ years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 4+ years of experience; or equivalent practical experience
• Demonstrated experience using AI as a primary development collaborator.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing safety-critical, high-assurance, or redundant systems.
• Experience building CI/CD and test infrastructure that improves engineering velocity and quality at scale.
• Experience designing evals for LLMs or AI agents.
• Experience with observability and monitoring for production systems.
• Experience with security controls such as least-privilege access, signed provenance, and policy-as-code.
• Experience with progressive delivery, including canary releases, traffic mirroring, and automated rollback.
• Experience improving testing standards through approaches such as TDD, BDD, load, stress, chaos, invariant, or mutation testing.
• Experience working in a highly regulated industry, such as financial services.
• Proven success leading large, cross-pillar technical initiatives.
• Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating durable, useful artifacts.
• A leadership style that empowers others rather than creating dependency.
• A strong quality bar for AI-generated output.

Travel Requirements & Working Conditions

• Up to 10% travel for team jams and internal developer conference
• Reliable internet access for any period of time working remotely, not in a Workiva office

How You’ll Be Rewarded

A discretionary bonus typically paid annually

Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire

401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

The salary range represents the low and high end of the salary range for this job in the US. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. The actual salary offer will carefully consider a wide range of factors, including your skills, qualifications, experience and other relevant factors.

Why Join Workiva

Workiva is the platform designed to bring confidence, control, and a competitive edge to the world’s most complex organizations. Our AI-powered platform unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a single, secure foundation-ensuring data is trusted, traceable, and ready to act on. With an unbroken path from source to output, leaders gain confidence in their numbers, visibility into current and emerging risks, and the ability to move with speed and precision in a constantly changing world.

At Workiva, you’ll bring technology to market that executives, boards, and regulators depend on. The work you do here helps organizations navigate uncertainty, maintain trust, and make decisions that stand up to scrutiny. If you’re energized by meaningful challenges, inspired by collaborative teams, and motivated to help organizations turn uncertainty into advantage, we’d love to meet you.

Employment decisions are made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other protected characteristic.

Workiva is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. To request assistance with the application process, please email [email protected].

Workiva employees are required to undergo comprehensive security and privacy training tailored to their roles, ensuring adherence to company policies and regulatory standards.

Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.