Principal AI Engineer

We are driven to do more. More for our customers and the financial professionals who offer our products. If you are driven to do more and love the challenge of pursuing more, Athene is your kind of company. You will find we offer more than the basics to create an inclusive and dynamic work environment at our various locations.

Purpose:

Athene’s Future Engineer Initiative is reimagining the software development lifecycle in the age of AI. We are building the foundation for agentic software engineering — where intelligent systems, model context protocols (MCPs), and developers collaborate to deliver secure, high-quality software faster and more reliably.
We are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to contribute to the design and implementation of this transformation. This role will work alongside other senior engineers, architects, and AI specialists to engineer the AI-augmented SDLC platform and embed intelligent automation into every stage of development. Your deep technical expertise and comprehensive understanding of industry-leading practices will guide and empower our engineering teams to deliver exceptional software solutions.

Accountabilities:

• Contribute to the design and evolution of the AI-augmented SDLC platform: help architect and implement the next-generation developer experience integrating AI agents, MCPs, and automation across build, test, review, and release pipelines.

• Operationalize AI engineering best practices: establish frameworks for RAG, vector search, and model evaluation; define standards for prompt engineering, versioning, and observability.

• Engineer for reliability and scale: ensure systems are extensible, testable, and compliant, embedding best practices from DORA’s AI Capabilities Model (healthy data ecosystems, small batches, strong version control).

• Lead by doing, embed with engineering teams to help implement AI-native workflows; provide mentorship and technical guidance to accelerate organizational adoption.

• Build agents and skills to assist with all aspects of software development — from architecture and code generation to deployment automation, testing, and operational diagnostics.

• Integrate AI capabilities into Athene’s Developer Portal to provide engineers with seamless access to intelligent tools, agents, and automation directly within their daily workflows.

• Collaborate across software, platform, and product teams to establish and maintain best practices in areas such as unit testing, branching strategies, architecture, cloud-native patterns, DevOps, and AI adoption.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience with 6+ years in software, platform, or systems engineering, including hands-on experience with Generative or Agentic AI systems.

• Proven success designing and operating large-scale, cloud-native developer platforms or toolchains that improve engineering velocity, reliability, and compliance.

• Strong expertise in modern SDLCs and software architecture, with proficiency in Python, TypeScript/Node.js, and AWS or Azure environments.

• Demonstrated experience integrating AI assistants and agentic workflows into the SDLC (e.g., code generation/review, testing, CI/CD, deployment), using LLM and agent frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, or equivalent.

• Ability to define and enforce engineering standards, metrics, and responsible AI practices, while mentoring engineers and collaborating across teams to deliver scalable, systemic improvements.

Drive. Discipline. Confidence. Focus. Commitment.  Learn more about working at Athene.

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Athene is committed to inclusion and is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.  We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.