Principal AI Engineer

Matillion; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company Equity

30 days holiday + bank holiday

5 days paid volunteering leave

Private Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Pension

Access to mental health support

Job summary

Matillion in the United States is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Maia AI team to shape agentic AI systems, drive architecture, and mentor engineers across squads. You will push performance with evals as models evolve and deliver scalable tools and integrations in a fast-moving environment.

You will collaborate with Product and Data Science to translate roadmap into technical reality, lead architecture decisions, and remain hands-on while guiding others to ship high-impact features at pace.

Qualifications

• Experience with agentic AI systems and scaling features.
• Strong Java programming background and distributed systems on AWS.
• Technical leadership and mentoring experience.
• Full stack capability with React, TypeScript, Tailwind; Langchain/Langgraph familiarity.
• Adaptable, fast-moving player who embraces evolving requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical architecture and design for the Maia team within a squad.
• Drive agentic AI feature development and integrations.
• Stay ahead of Gen AI developments and trial new models/tools.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and guidance.
• Collaborate with Product and Data Science to translate vision into reality.

Skills

Agentic AI systems experience

Technical leadership

Full stack capability

Adaptable and fast-moving

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Java

AWS

React

TypeScript

Tailwind

Langchain

Langgraph

Job description

Are you ready to shape the future of data?

Matillion is the company behind Maia, the AI Data Automation platform.

In the AI economy, demand for data is exploding. Manual data engineering can’t keep up. Maia fixes that by combining 15 years of data expertise with agentic AI to eliminate the manual work that slows data teams down. Organisations like Cisco, DocuSign, and Slack are already using it to deliver real business impact, faster.

We started in Manchester and now we’re global - with teams across the UK, US and India.

We are driven, curious, energetic people who move fast, think big and hold ourselves to a high standard. We’re here to make a dent in the universe bigger than ourselves. And we’re looking for people who want to be part of it.

About the role

As a Principal Engineer on our Maia AI team, you'll be at the heart of everything we do: designing agentic AI systems, leveraging evals to continually validate their performance as model capabilities evolve, building new tools and integrations, and staying finger-on-the-pulse with the latest developments in Gen AI. This isn't BAU engineering – this is high-visibility, high-impact work where your decisions shape the product.

You'll be driving architecture, mentoring engineers, and feeding into strategy. Things move quickly here. Requirements evolve, new opportunities emerge, and we need someone who thrives in that environment. If you have been working on Agentic AI projects and taking them into production environments – and you want to do that at scale in a world-class engineering team – this is the role for you.

What you will be doing

• Lead technical architecture and design for the Maia team - working within a squad to define direction, validate proposals, and ensure we're building scalable, maintainable software at pace
• Drive agentic AI feature development - building new tools, integrations, and workflows that push the boundaries of what Maia can do
• Stay ahead of the curve on Gen AI developments - trialling new models, tools, and approaches, feeding insights into team strategy and championing new ways of working
• Act as technical mentor and coach to engineers across the team - raising the bar through code reviews, design input, and hands‑on guidance
• Collaborate closely with our Product Manager and Data Science team to translate product vision into technical reality, balancing innovation with code quality and delivery pace

What we are looking for

• Proven experience working on agentic AI systems - you understand how they differ from traditional systems, you've built and led features in this space, and you have a point of view on how to test and scale them
• Deep programming background, ideally with Java, combined with hands‑on experience building scalable distributed systems on AWS - you write great code and think seriously about architecture
• Technical leadership experience - you've been a tech lead, influenced architecture decisions, and helped other engineers grow; you can communicate complex concepts to non-technical stakeholders without breaking a sweat
• Full stack capability is a strong plus - particularly React, TypeScript, and Tailwind - and familiarity with frameworks like Langchain or Langgraph would be welcome
• Adaptable and fast-moving - you thrive in an environment where requirements evolve, you're comfortable with ambiguity, and you have a genuine bias for action when it comes to adopting and championing new technologies

More about Matillion

We operate a flexible working culture that promotes work-life balance, with benefits including:

• Company Equity

• 30 days holiday + bank holiday

• 5 days paid volunteering leave

• Private Health Insurance

• Life Insurance

• Pension

• Access to mental health support

Matillion is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all of our team. Matillion prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Matillion does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by law.