Principal Engineer I - AI Engineering

Job Title:

Principal Engineer I - AI Engineering

Location:

Block 23

What you'll do:

As a Principal Engineer I, you'll provide SME expertise in GitHub Copilot, agentic engineering, and adjacent technology domains to ensure enterprise solutions are secure, compliant, reliable, and supportable. You'll serve as a technical owner and strategic engineering lead for enterprise GitHub Copilot and the organization's agentic software engineering capabilities, providing technical direction for their architecture, configuration, integration, governance, lifecycle, and evolution.
This role is responsible for defining and evolving the technical vision, architecture, engineering patterns, governance, and capabilities of the enterprise Agentic SDLC Harness, including reusable agents, skills, instructions, rules, plugins, MCP integrations and other AI-assisted engineering capabilities. As a Principal Engineer I, you will partner with Development, Architecture, DevOps, Quality Engineering, Security, Cloud and Governance teams to establish a scalable and secure ecosystem that accelerates software delivery while maintaining engineering standards and controls.
You'll partner with project sponsors, engineering teams, platform owners, and technology leaders to refine requirements, evaluate technical approaches, and drive solutions from concept through enterprise adoption. You'll provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries, influence engineering standards and architectural decisions, communicate complex technical concepts to both engineering and leadership audiences, and mentor engineers in GitHub Copilot, agentic engineering, DevOps, and related software engineering practices.
This role requires deep technical expertise in GitHub Copilot, agentic software engineering, modern software development, GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps, DevOps and platform engineering, CI/CD, APIs and integrations, development frameworks, identity and access, and secure software delivery. Strong strategic and critical thinking, technical leadership, communication, and collaboration skills are required to influence engineering practices and establish trusted relationships across development teams, business partners, technology leadership, and governance functions.

• Serve as an enterprise technical owner and SME for GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted software engineering.
• Define the technical strategy, architecture, standards, configuration model, and operating model for enterprise GitHub Copilot and agentic software engineering capabilities.
• Engineer, configure, and evolve enterprise GitHub Copilot capabilities, including managed settings, enterprise and organizational policies, model availability, custom agents, skills, instructions, rules, plugins, approved MCP servers, and related extensibility capabilities.
• Evaluate new and evolving GitHub Copilot and agentic engineering capabilities through controlled testing and experimentation, and determine enterprise readiness, security and governance requirements, adoption strategy, implementation approach, and business value.
• Design and evolve the enterprise Agentic SDLC Harness that defines and governs how AI agents and capabilities interact with developers, source repositories, CI/CD platforms, development tools, and enterprise systems, including patterns for orchestration, tool access, context management, permissions, and human oversight.
• Design and implement technical guardrails for AI-assisted engineering, including access controls, approved tools and models, MCP server permissions, agent capabilities, repository interactions, data handling, and other controls required to balance developer productivity with enterprise security, regulatory, compliance, and risk requirements.
• Establish and operate lifecycle management practices for Copilot and agentic engineering configurations, including source control, peer review, testing, approval, versioning, staged deployment, promotion of changes across test and enterprise environments, and rollback.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex GitHub Copilot and agentic engineering issues, including configuration, authentication, IDE integration, policy enforcement, agent/plugin behavior, MCP integrations, and enterprise platform interoperability.
• Establish monitoring and operational practices for platform availability, configuration health, integration reliability, usage, and emerging technical risks.
• Develop reference implementations, technical standards, engineering patterns, playbooks, reusable examples, quick-start guides, and enablement materials that accelerate safe adoption across development teams.
• Define and monitor enterprise metrics for adoption, usage, developer experience, quality, reliability, engineering effectiveness, and value realization; use these insights to identify opportunities to improve GitHub Copilot, the Agentic SDLC ecosystem, and developer productivity.

• Communicate platform roadmap, adoption, risk, technical health, and value realization to engineering and technology leadership.

• Maintain enterprise technical architecture and engineering documentation for GitHub Copilot and agentic development capabilities, including reference architectures, integration patterns, configuration standards, security models, decision records, support procedures, and operational runbooks.

What you'll need:

• 8+ years of progressive software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, developer enablement, or related IT experience, including 5+ years designing, engineering, administering, or supporting enterprise development platforms.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, system analysis or a related study; Masters or MBA in related field preferred.
• Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, SDLC processes, source control, CI/CD, developer tooling, and platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience engineering, administering, and supporting enterprise development platforms, including GitHub Enterprise and preferably Azure DevOps, including repository governance, identity and access, integrations, policies, CI/CD, and developer tooling.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted software engineering, including enterprise configuration, agentic capabilities, customization, integration, governance, and developer enablement.

• Experience architecting enterprise developer platforms and developer enablement ecosystems, including reusable frameworks, integrations, automation, engineering patterns, and shared platform capabilities.

• Strong understanding of generative AI and agentic architectures, including AI agents, tool calling, agent orchestration, prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval patterns, human-in-the-loop controls, and secure integration with enterprise systems.
• Experience designing security and governance controls for AI-assisted engineering, including identity and access, least-privilege tool access, secrets and sensitive-data protection, repository permissions, third-party integrations, MCP servers, and agent/tool execution boundaries.
• Demonstrated software engineering experience and ability to design, build, test, and maintain automation, integrations, developer tooling, APIs, scripts, and reusable engineering components.
• Ability to translate emerging technologies into secure, scalable, supportable enterprise solutions.
• Ability to work effectively in a team environment.
• Advanced knowledge of enterprise architecture, technology governance, security and risk frameworks, with demonstrated ability to integrate new capabilities into existing enterprise platforms and operating models.

• Experience working within a regulated financial-services environment and supporting technology risk assessments, audits, regulatory examinations, and control-evidence requests is preferred.

• Advanced speaking and writing communication skills.
• Advanced knowledge of applicable regulatory and legal compliance obligations, rules and regulations, industry standards and practices.
• Previous technical leadership experience preferred.

Benefits you’ll love:
We offer all the important things you'd want — like competitive salaries, an ownership stake in the company, medical and dental insurance, time off, a great 401k matching program, tuition assistance program, an employee volunteer program, and a wellness program. In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to bolster your business knowledge, learning the ins and outs of how successful companies operate and manage their finances, giving you invaluable hands-on experience to help grow your career!

About the company:

Western Alliance Bank, Member FDIC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Alliance Bancorporation. Serving clients nationwide, Western Alliance Bank includes six legacy bank brands — Alliance Association Bank, Alliance Bank of Arizona, Bank of Nevada, Bridge Bank, First Independent Bank and Torrey Pines Bank — that remain part of the company’s heritage, as well as AmeriHome Mortgage, a Western Alliance Bank Company.

Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to equal employment and will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, sex, color, religion, age, nation origin, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or genetic information. Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process and/or need an alternative method of applying, please email [email protected] or call 602-386-2488.  When contacting us, please provide your contact information and state the nature of your accessibility issue.  We will only respond to inquiries concerning requests that involve a reasonable accommodation in the application process.

© Western Alliance Bancorporation