Remote Principal Engineer: AI Platform & Architecture

Eliassen Group; Richmond (VA); Remote; USD 124,000 - 138,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

401k with company matching

Life insurance

Job summary

Eliassen Group is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer for a remote, contract-to-hire engagement. You will help shape the onboarding platform, drive architectural decisions, and lead AI-powered innovations while coding daily. The role partners with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to embed AI capabilities across the platform.

You will join a team of about ten and influence the organization’s direction through strong technical leadership and customer-focused problem solving.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production SaaS platforms.
• Experience in staff/principal/lead engineering roles or similar.
• Strong architectural design experience in cloud-native environments.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams and systems.
• Experience partnering with product and business stakeholders to drive outcomes.
• Balance of technical excellence with business priorities.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive architectural direction across the platform.
• Make strategic technical decisions impacting scalability, reliability, security, and future product innovation.
• Guide platform evolution while balancing speed and long-term maintainability.
• Identify technical risks before they become business problems.
• Write production code daily and contribute to feature development.
• Design, build, and support scalable SaaS applications.
• Lead implementation efforts for complex customer and platform initiatives.
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and provide technical mentorship.
• Help define and implement AI strategy and AI-powered capabilities using modern LLM architectures.
• Develop proofs of concept for customer-facing AI use cases.
• Architect solutions supporting customer-managed AI, including BYOM and BYOK.
• Evaluate emerging technologies including MCP architectures, AI agents, orchestration frameworks, and enterprise AI infrastructure patterns.
• Operate as a Product Engineer and partner with Product Leadership, Engineering Leadership, Customer Success, and Sales.
• Engage with customers to understand onboarding challenges and build demonstrations and prototypes.
• Translate customer requirements into platform capabilities and support strategic initiatives.

Skills

Go (Golang)

React

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Distributed systems

Tools

OpenAI

Anthropic platforms

MCP concepts

Agentic AI frameworks

Vector databases

Retrieval

API platform design

Salesforce ecosystem integrations

Job description

Eliassen Group is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer for a remote, contract-to-hire engagement. You will help shape the onboarding platform, drive architectural decisions, and lead AI-powered innovations while coding daily. The role partners with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to embed AI capabilities across the platform.

You will join a team of about ten and influence the organization’s direction through strong technical leadership and customer-focused problem solving.