Remote Principal Engineer - AI-Native Systems Lead

Prestige Staffing; New York (NY); Remote; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Prestige Staffing is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, AI-Native Engineering Lead, to guide a three-person pod building an AI operations product. This hands-on leadership role blends architecture, operations, and software delivery to shape an AI-enabled engineering culture.

The role is 100% remote in the United States, reporting to engineering leadership, with responsibility from design through deployment and the first 90 days of critical production work.

Qualifications

• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with technical leadership at Principal or Staff+ level.
• Strong software architecture and design skills balancing delivery speed, maintainability, reliability, security, and scalability.
• Experience delivering and operating production software end to end.
• Strong programming skills across a modern stack and ability to work across application layers.
• Deep understanding of testing strategies, CI/CD, version control, observability, security, and troubleshooting.
• Practical experience using AI coding agents in real engineering workflows.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into technical tasks and drive them through completion.
• Excellent technical communication, problem-solving, mentoring, and decision-making skills.
• Track record of owning business and technical outcomes and leading small autonomous teams.
• Experience with agentic coding workflows and AI-enabled development infrastructure preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction, architecture, design, and implementation strategy for applications, services, and systems.
• Work hands-on alongside two engineers and AI coding tools.
• Translate product goals into pragmatic, maintainable technical solutions.
• Establish lightweight engineering standards, conventions, and documentation.
• Integrate AI coding agents into requirements analysis, code generation, testing, and documentation.
• Break complex initiatives into small, independently testable increments.
• Evaluate AI-generated code and decide on acceptance or changes.
• Own production delivery from problem definition through deployment and monitoring.
• Establish observability, deployment automation, rollback procedures, and safeguards.
• Define quality controls including automated testing, code review, and security checks.
• Develop guardrails for AI access to source code and production data.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and design discussions.
• Foster ownership, accountability, and continuous learning; share AI practices broadly.
• Deliver meaningful production capabilities within 90 days and establish a repeatable AI-native model.
• $200,000–$250,000 annual compensation; authority to shape processes for a three-person team.
• Own a focused area within a new AI operations product; establish a repeatable AI development model.

Skills

Technical leadership

Software architecture

CI/CD

AI tooling

Mentoring

Cross-functional

Code reviews

Observability

Problem solving

Communication

Tools

Claude Code

OpenAI Codex

Job description

Prestige Staffing is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, AI-Native Engineering Lead, to guide a three-person pod building an AI operations product. This hands-on leadership role blends architecture, operations, and software delivery to shape an AI-enabled engineering culture.

The role is 100% remote in the United States, reporting to engineering leadership, with responsibility from design through deployment and the first 90 days of critical production work.