Principal AI-Native Engineer - Remote Production Systems

Ionic Partners; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Ionic Partners is seeking Principal AI-Native Engineers to architect and operate production‑level agentic systems across portfolio companies. You will ramp into live production codebases, extend a next‑gen orchestration framework, and own outcomes, costs, and maintenance.

The role emphasizes autonomy, domain collaboration, and high technical standards. You will design scalable agent architectures, ensure robust safety and cost controls, and push for measurable business improvements across

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or related field; equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 3+ years building AI‑Native or agentic systems that reached production and were used for real work.
• Demonstrated end‑to‑end ownership: systems you designed, built, shipped, and operated.
• Experience integrating AI systems with production platforms including authentication and controls.
• Experience designing evaluations for non‑deterministic systems: eval harnesses, baselines, regressions.
• Experience operating LLM‑based systems in production, with tracing, guardrails, and cost management.
• Adaptability, collaboration with domain experts, and strong communication.

Responsibilities

• Partner with subject-matter experts to turn specs into agentic designs and surface failure modes.
• Design agent architectures: boundaries, orchestration, tool surfaces, state and memory.
• Build, ship, and operate production agentic systems end to end.
• Extend and harden the in-house orchestration framework and QA agents.
• Create and maintain machine-readable context artifacts covering products and customers.
• Define success criteria and build eval harnesses, baselines, and review sampling.
• Instrument systems with tracing and observability for production diagnosability.
• Retire or replace systems that fail to deliver value.

Skills

Agentic systems

Production ownership

End-to-end ownership

System integration

Evaluation design

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher in CS/CE/SE

Tools

LLM platforms

Observability tools

Job description

Ionic Partners is seeking Principal AI-Native Engineers to architect and operate production‑level agentic systems across portfolio companies. You will ramp into live production codebases, extend a next‑gen orchestration framework, and own outcomes, costs, and maintenance.

The role emphasizes autonomy, domain collaboration, and high technical standards. You will design scalable agent architectures, ensure robust safety and cost controls, and push for measurable business improvements across