Principle Software Engineer

As a Principal Engineer, you will be the senior technical leader responsible for architectural coherence across Lighthouse and the enterprise AI systems it accelerates. This is a hands-on leadership role; you will write and review code on the highest-risk paths, define durable system boundaries, and lead critical engineering decisions where enterprise data, permissions, workflows, and models meet.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture and Contracts: Set and evolve the reference architecture across the Lighthouse control plane, Context Layer, workflow/agent runtimes, and production operations. Define the contracts that keep the platform portable.
• Security and Deployment: Own security, multi-tenancy, and deployment architecture across shared, dedicated, and customer-hosted environments (identity, authorisation, secrets, data residency).
• Workflow Reliability: Design reliable execution for deterministic and model-driven workflows (handling long-running states, idempotency, partial failures, and rollbacks).
• AI Quality and Ops: Establish engineering standards for AI quality and system operations, including evaluation datasets, regression gates, tracing, latency/cost budgets, and model fallbacks.
• Execution and Mentorship: Personally design and implement components with the highest architectural or security risk while mentoring engineers and aligning with stakeholders.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of production software experience, including principal-level technical leadership across distributed, data-intensive, platform, or enterprise systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise in Python, API/service design, relational data modelling, asynchronous/event-driven systems, and cloud-native operations.
• Proven AI/ML Production Experience: Track record of taking AI/ML systems beyond prototypes into production (structured model outputs, tool use, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails).
• Architectural Excellence: Experience defining architecture across multiple services and deployment modes, handling identity, authorisation, customer isolation, and failure recovery.
• Strong Technical Judgment: Sharp decision-making skills regarding build-vs-buy choices, data ownership, scalability, and knowing exactly how much abstraction is justified at each stage.

Nice to Have / Bonus:

• Experience with enterprise metadata, semantic/knowledge-graph systems, workflow engines, or data/developer platforms.
• Familiarity with our potential stack: FastAPI/Pydantic, PostgreSQL, Redis, Event Systems, MCP, Vector/Graph stores, Docker/Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP.
• Experience deploying into regulated, private-network, or customer-controlled environments.