Principal Software Engineer (Applied AI)

Standard Template Labs is a stealth-mode, AI-native startup reimagining the future of IT Service and Configuration Management. Backed by leading investors, we're leveraging AI, graph-based architecture, and exceptional design to transform how enterprises manage and engage with their technology ecosystems.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI to own the end-to-end technical vision for how intelligence is embedded throughout our platform. This is a hands-on role for a senior technical leader who excels at building production AI systems—someone who can architect large-scale infrastructure, ship high-quality code, and apply cutting-edge AI techniques directly into real enterprise workflows.

You’ll define what “applied AI” means for our platform: designing reasoning pipelines, operationalizing LLMs, integrating agents into system workflows, and building the underlying distributed systems that make real-time intelligence possible. You’ll mentor senior engineers, influence product direction, and help shape an engineering culture where AI is a first-class building block—not a bolt-on feature.

Responsibilities

AI-Centric Architecture & Strategic Leadership

• Architect the core intelligence layer of the platform, integrating LLMs, agents, vector search, retrieval pipelines, and graph reasoning directly into enterprise workflows.

• Identify high-impact opportunities where generative, predictive, or autonomous AI can eliminate operational toil, improve system understanding, or enhance decision-making.

• Lead architectural decisions around model selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure (custom vs OSS vs third-party APIs).

• Establish best practices for AI-first engineering—including prompt design, context assembly, evaluators, guardrails, and continuous model monitoring.

• Partner with leadership to align AI capabilities with product strategy and customer outcomes.

Hands-On Applied AI Development

• Build production-grade workflows powered by LLMs and agents, including automated enrichment, anomaly explanation, topology generation, and natural language querying.

• Design distributed systems that efficiently support high-throughput inference, embedding generation, and graph reasoning.

• Implement retrieval-augmented pipelines, embeddings, and vector search to power intelligent insights and contextual understanding.

• Write clean, well-structured code—and champion the use of AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) to accelerate productivity and quality.

• Continuously evaluate emerging AI frameworks, agent runtimes, orchestration tools, and model APIs, integrating them where they drive real user value.

Mentorship, Influence & Scaling Expertise

• Mentor engineers on applied AI patterns, system design for AI workloads, and practical approaches to model integration.

• Lead design reviews and architecture deep-dives focused on delivering reliable, safe, and scalable AI systems.

• Help attract and develop top engineering talent excited about AI-native platforms and intelligent automation.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including technical leadership within complex, high-scale systems.

• A track record of architecting and shipping distributed systems with meaningful AI or automation components.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, or model integration patterns.

• Strong system design expertise across data modeling, event-driven architecture, caching, storage, and performance optimization.

• Proficiency in a modern programming language (Go, Rust, Python, Java, or C++).

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving engineering best practices.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and modern DevOps/tooling.

Nice to Have

• Experience operationalizing ML/LLM workloads in production.

• Background in microservices, event-driven systems, or real-time data pipelines.

• Prior work in high-throughput, low-latency, or mission-critical systems.

• Open-source contributions or examples of technical leadership in distributed systems or AI tooling.

Why this Role

This is a rare opportunity to design and build the foundational architecture for an AI-native enterprise platform—one where intelligent systems don’t just support the product, they are the product. You’ll shape how enterprises use reasoning engines, agents, and generative models to automate complex technology operations at scale.

If you’re excited about building production systems where AI is deeply embedded into every workflow, we’d love to meet you.

What We Offer

• The opportunity to architect foundational features for an AI-first enterprise platform.

• The opportunity to take ownership of critical systems that scale to millions of users

• A culture that values craftsmanship, autonomy, and technical excellence

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits package

• Work from our Flatiron District, Manhattan office, where you’ll be side-by-side with the founding team in a supportive, collaborative setting. Our team works on-site five days a week, growing and building together, and the location is easy to reach with plenty of public transportation options.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state or local laws.