Principal Engineer - Autonomous AI Platforms

Dell Technologies; Hopkinton (MA); On-site; USD 172,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Dell Technologies is seeking a Software Principal Engineer for the Autonomous AI Software Engineering team in Hopkinton, MA. This onsite role focuses on turning autonomous agents into dependable engineering practices, setting up proofs of concept, and integrating viable AI solutions into the development lifecycle.

You will spend most of your time building and experimenting (70%+) with AI agents as a core part of your daily workflow, guiding architecture within ISG Developer Experience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience in an AI-native startup-style team.
• Proven track record building autonomous agent platform components in production.
• Experience operating long-running autonomous agents in containers, checkpointing, and recovery.
• Deep expertise in context engineering for large codebases with indexing and retrieval.
• Experience with evaluation-driven development: benchmarks and automated verification.
• Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent.
• Experience deploying autonomous agent platforms in enterprise environments.
• Production experience with multi-agent systems and agent benchmarks.

Responsibilities

• Run hands-on proofs of concept and pilots of autonomous software-engineering agents and agent platforms, from environment setup and integration through results, on representative real-world engineering work.
• Build evaluation harnesses: realistic task suites, benchmarks, and metrics for output quality, level of autonomy, reliability, speed, cost, and security, enabling fair and repeatable comparisons.
• Verify and validate agent output using automated tests, mutation testing, static and security analysis, acceptance‑criteria checks, and calibrated human review to identify failure points.
• Integrate agents into the engineering toolchain (source control, CI/CD, issue tracking, specifications, and quality gates) via APIs, MCP, and custom tools, building extensions where standard solutions fall short.
• Increase autonomy safely by implementing guardrails, sandboxing, observability (traces and replay), and feedback loops, helping engineering teams adopt agent‑driven workflows with confidence.

Skills

Software engineering

Autonomous agents

Context engineering

Evaluation development

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

PostgreSQL

Git-based workflows

Job description

Dell Technologies is seeking a Software Principal Engineer for the Autonomous AI Software Engineering team in Hopkinton, MA. This onsite role focuses on turning autonomous agents into dependable engineering practices, setting up proofs of concept, and integrating viable AI solutions into the development lifecycle.

You will spend most of your time building and experimenting (70%+) with AI agents as a core part of your daily workflow, guiding architecture within ISG Developer Experience.