{"id":894541,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zeroto1-principal-engineer","title":"Principal Engineer","company":{"id":3193,"name":"Zeroto1","domain":"zeroto1.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/zeroto1","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Lighthouse","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T09:09:45Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T09:09:45Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"As Principal Engineer, you will be the senior technical leader responsible for architectural coherence across Lighthouse and the systems it accelerates. This is not an architecture-only role: you will write and review code on the highest-risk paths, define durable contracts and boundaries, and lead decisions where enterprise data, permissions, workflow state, models, and customer-controlled infrastructure meet.\nResponsibilities:\nSet and evolve the reference architecture across the Lighthouse control plane, Context Layer, data and execution adapters, workflow and agent runtime, evaluation, and production operations.\nDefine the contracts that keep the platform portable: canonical business concepts and tenant mappings; reusable Context Modules and task Recipes; context requests, plans, packages, and traces; and the runtime boundary between context compilation and data execution.\nOwn security and deployment architecture for shared, dedicated, and customer-hosted environments, including identity, authorisation, tenant isolation, secrets, network boundaries, data residency, audit, and policy enforcement before retrieval and action.\nDesign reliable execution for deterministic and model-driven workflows, including long-running state, approvals, retries, idempotency, timeouts, partial failure, compensation, safe replay, and rollback.\nEstablish engineering standards for AI quality and system operations: evaluation datasets, regression gates, tracing, evidence and grounding, service-level objectives, incident learning, latency and cost budgets, and model or tool fallback.\nMake build-versus-buy and open-source extension decisions with clear upgrade paths; turn proven patterns into versioned services, APIs, connectors, SDKs, and solution templates rather than premature abstractions or customer-specific forks.\nPersonally design, implement, and review the components with the greatest architectural, security, performance, or operational risk; mentor engineers and communicate decisions clearly to product, business, and customer stakeholders.\nWhat success looks like:\nZero to 1 / CAREERS Lighthouse has clear system boundaries and stable contracts, so new use cases reuse platform capabilities without creating hidden coupling or one-off forks.\nContext is permission-aware, bounded, testable, and explainable: the system can show which business definitions, sources, policies, freshness checks, and evidence supported an answer or action.\nProduction workflows degrade safely and recover predictably, with measurable reliability, quality, latency, cost, and business outcomes.\nThe engineering team moves faster because high-impact decisions are documented, risks are surfaced early, ownership is clear, and standards are enforced through code and tooling.\nRequirements:\n8+ years building production software, including principal-level technical leadership across distributed, data-intensive, platform, or enterprise systems.\nDeep hands-on strength in Python, API and service design, relational data modelling, asynchronous and event-driven systems, and cloud-native operations.\nExperience defining architecture across multiple services and deployment modes, including identity, authorisation, multi-tenancy or customer isolation, observability, and failure recovery.\nExperience taking AI or ML systems beyond prototypes, including structured model outputs, tool use, retrieval or context, evaluation, guardrails, and production debugging.\nStrong judgment about system boundaries, data ownership, consistency, scalability, security, build-versus-buy choices, and how much abstraction is justified at each stage.\nA track record of leading through influence while staying close to implementation, code quality, production behaviour, delivery sequencing, and customer outcomes.\nUseful, but not required:\nExperience with enterprise metadata, semantic or knowledge-graph systems, workflow engines, data platforms, developer platforms, or multi-tenant SaaS.\nFamiliarity with parts of our likely stack: FastAPI/Pydantic, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues or event systems, MCP, vector or graph stores, Docker/Kubernetes, and AWS, Azure, or GCP.\nExperience integrating or extending open-source platforms while preserving upgrade paths, or deploying into regulated, private-network, or customer-controlled environments.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4318,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Consulting & Digital Transformation","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-14T09:09:45Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long 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