Principal Software Architect

About the role

You will define and own the end to end architecture for AI agents embedded directly within our engineering development workflows. You will translate the company's pragmatic optimism and proactive collaboration values into a technical blueprint that enables AI to reliably build, test, and deploy software. You will own the guardrails and measurement frameworks that ensure AI automation delivers measurable ROI without compromising safety or reliability. You will partner with executive leadership to align the AI driven development strategy with business outcomes across generation technology teams. You will act as the primary technical evangelist for AI agents, coaching engineering teams on new ways of working while maintaining excellence without ego. You will establish the canonical reference architectures that allow AI tools to interoperate cleanly across the full software lifecycle. You will be the decisive voice on which problems are solved with AI automation and which require human judgment.

Key facts

What you'll do

Architect the foundational layers of our AI agent platform, including model orchestration, prompt templates, and deterministic fallbacks for critical generator control logic.

Define the end to end workflow for AI driven code generation, specifying how agents interact with version control, issue trackers, and deployment pipelines.

Establish rigorous guardrails and validation policies that ensure AI generated changes meet our safety, reliability, and regulatory standards for power systems.

Design experiments that quantify the ROI of AI automation in engineering workflows, analyzing cycle time, defect rates, and operational stability.

Lead cross functional collaborations with hardware engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to integrate AI agents into the full product development lifecycle.

Own the technical roadmap for AI tooling, prioritizing features that reduce manual effort, improve throughput, and enhance decision clarity.

Implement observability and telemetry for AI agent behavior, enabling transparent debugging and continuous improvement of autonomous workflows.

Champion the reuse of architectural patterns so that new AI agents can be onboarded quickly and behave consistently across services and teams.

Mentor senior engineers in advanced AI assisted development practices, elevating the entire engineering organization without sacrificing excellence without ego.

Evaluate emerging large language model capabilities and infrastructure options, recommending adoption paths that align with our pragmatic optimism and long term vision.

Coordinate security and compliance reviews for AI generated artifacts, ensuring traceability and accountability in every deployment.

Facilitate retrospectives on AI assisted delivery, turning empirical results into actionable process improvements for engineering teams.

Partner with our utility and energy sector customers to validate that AI driven development supports the reliability and affordability of our power solutions.

Champion an open but controlled experimentation culture, balancing rapid innovation with the rigorous validation required for mission critical energy systems.

Requirements

You hold a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related technical field.

You bring 10 plus years of professional software development experience across multiple technologies and stacks.

You have at least 5 years of hands on experience architecting distributed systems that integrate third party services and APIs.

You are fluent in modern programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript, with demonstrated ability to write production grade code.

You have a strong track record of designing and implementing scalable APIs and integration layers used by multiple teams.

You possess deep knowledge of software development lifecycle practices including version control, CI/CD, testing, and deployment automation.

You have experience building and operating observability, monitoring, and alerting systems for complex distributed services.

You are comfortable making high impact technical decisions in ambiguous environments while communicating clearly with both technical and non technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

Experience applying AI tools such as linter agents, code search and retrieval tools, and generative assistants in a software engineering context.

Familiarity with energy, utilities, or hardware in the loop simulation environments is helpful but not required.

Practical notes

This role is full time based in Menlo Park California.

Travel may be required up to 25 percent.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.