Principal Software Engineer - Executive Director

Lead a small, high-impact engineering team that reimagines developer workflows for an agentic world — building agents that act across platforms, co-developing agent-friendly interfaces and eliminating processes designed around manual human coordination.

AI coding assistants have changed how developers write code. The next frontier is the work around it: environment setup, compliance evidence, deployment and coordination. This team will reimagine those workflows for an agentic world — not put a chatbot in front of existing processes. Developers express an outcome; agents act across platforms to deliver it, with appropriate controls and human approval.

As an Executive Director within Cloud Foundational Services in Infrastructure Platforms at JPMorgan Chase, you will lead a four-person team, including yourself, with senior sponsorship to eliminate unnecessary steps and ship agentic solutions into production. This is a hands-on delivery role: you will own strategy, make architecture decisions and co-build agent-friendly interfaces with platform teams.

Your first deliverable will be an agentic cloud platform onboarding assistant. Within the first 90 days, you will baseline the workflow and deliver a bounded production capability, establishing patterns for expansion into provisioning, compliance evidence and change management. Further scope will be driven by demonstrated impact.

Job Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and delivery roadmap for agentic developer workflow acceleration across Cloud Foundational Services, prioritising observed workflow friction, end-to-end lead time, developer effort, failure rates and risk.
• Reimagine workflows with developers, platform owners and control partners around agent-led execution, challenging which steps and hand-offs remain necessary while preserving required control outcomes.
• Drive cross-organisational delivery by contributing design, code and testing to partner teams’ APIs and tool interfaces so agents can discover capabilities, invoke actions and verify results, rather than simply raising requirements.
• Set the technical direction for agentic systems: orchestration, context and tool integration, evaluation, reliable execution and the boundary between agent decisions, deterministic operations and human judgement.
• Baseline the initial cloud onboarding workflow and deliver a tightly scoped production agentic assistant within the first 90 days, with clear success criteria and an agreed delivery plan.
• Build and lead a four-person team comprising yourself, two VP engineers and one Associate engineer, establishing engineering culture, delivery cadence and quality standards.
• Establish safe operating boundaries for agents, including identity and least-privilege permissions, auditable actions, appropriate approval points, protection against unsafe tool use, failure recovery and clear operational ownership.
• Measure impact against a baseline, including lead time, developer effort, task success, adoption, error rates and ongoing operating cost, with monthly sponsor updates and quarterly leadership checkpoints.
• Maintain hands-on technical involvement through design and code reviews, architecture decisions and direct support to unblock delivery.
  Establish a continuous developer feedback channel so priorities remain grounded in real workflows and user needs.
• Build an evidence-based case for expanding the team’s scope and capacity as results demonstrate value.
   

Required Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• Significant hands-on software development experience with a track record of progressing into engineering leadership while staying technically current: reading code, reviewing designs and diagnosing production issues.
• A track record of delivering change across organisational boundaries through influence, evidence and persistence, including initiatives requiring multiple teams to evolve their systems or ways of working.
• Deep technical credibility in cloud infrastructure and platform automation, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, identity and access management, and distributed systems. Our environment includes AWS, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience building, or technically leading the delivery of, agentic AI systems that use tools and take actions across systems, handle failures and operate within defined controls — beyond chatbots, summaries or code generation alone.
• Experience decomposing large, ambiguous problems into phased delivery plans with measurable outcomes and explicit dependencies.
• Strong systems thinking across interfaces, contracts, failure modes, operational ownership and the organisational dynamics of cross-platform change.
• Experience operating with senior stakeholder visibility, defending prioritisation decisions and declining scope that would dilute delivery impact.
• Clear, direct communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A security-first mindset, integrating risk and compliance judgement throughout design, delivery and operation.
   

Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• Experience operating agentic AI systems in production at enterprise scale, including evaluation, observability, agent identity, permission boundaries and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Experience in regulated or large-scale enterprise environments where compliance, change management and auditability are essential.
• A track record of reducing operational toil and manual effort through automation at scale.
• Experience co-developing solutions with other teams, including contributions to their codebases and platform interfaces.
• Demonstrated ability to quantify engineering improvements and communicate their value in business terms.
• Experience building or operating developer platforms, internal tooling or infrastructure-as-a-service.
• Experience defining the scope, approach and success criteria for greenfield engineering initiatives.