Principal Software Engineering Lead (AI)

Be a part of our success story. Launch offers talented and motivated people the opportunity to do the best work of their lives in a dynamic and growing company. Through competitive salaries, outstanding benefits, internal advancement opportunities, and recognized community involvement, you will have the chance to create a career you can be proud of. Your new trajectory starts here at Launch!

The Role:

Launch is actively seeking a visionary Solutions Architect / Principal Software Engineering Lead (AI) to design and deliver modern engineering and applied AI solutions across client engagements. This role blends deep hands‑on engineering, architectural leadership, AI system design, and client advisory. You will operate across system design, production‑grade engineering, multi‑agent architectures, cloud platform strategy, and the development of Launch’s AI practice.

Responsibilities Include:

Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Define technical direction across discovery, design, build, and production hardening.
• Evaluate client ecosystems and identify opportunities for AI/ML integration.
• Lead architecture reviews, design sessions, and technology decisions.
• Translate ambiguous business needs into structured engineering execution plans.

AI Engineering & Delivery

• Architect production‑grade agentic systems (multi‑agent orchestration, skill/tool composition, inter‑agent protocols like A2A and MCP).
• Build and maintain MCP server ecosystems integrating enterprise APIs, data sources, and external services.
• Develop reusable agent skills, prompt engineering standards, and evaluation frameworks.
• Architect RAG pipelines, model lifecycle infrastructure, and fine‑tuning workflows.
• Integrate AI platforms such as Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Anthropic, and Vertex AI into enterprise systems.
• Establish AI‑native engineering practices using GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
• Design AI evaluation and observability systems (LLM evals, drift detection, red‑teaming).
• Implement responsible AI governance, guardrails, and access controls.

Hands‑On Engineering

• Write production code and lead engineering standards through example.
• Design cloud‑native architectures across AWS and Azure (microservices, serverless, containers).
• Build Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Bicep).
• Develop CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
• Implement observability toolchains using Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or Azure Monitor.
• Drive security-by-design across IAM, networking, secrets management, and compliance automation.

Leadership & Client Advisory

• Lead engineering teams from small squads to 10+ person delivery teams.
• Mentor and develop engineers through pairing, reviews, and architectural coaching.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to technical leadership and executives.
• Influence across complex stakeholder groups using technical credibility.
• Lead discovery, requirements definition, and strategic problem framing.
• Produce high‑quality documents: proposals, SOWs, architecture decision records, executive updates.
• Contribute to practice development, hiring, and thought leadership efforts.

Qualifications:

Must‑Have

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or related field.
• 10+ years software engineering with architectural leadership.
• 3+ years hands‑on AI/ML in production (LLMs, RAG, agents, MLOps, model serving).
• Strong client‑facing consulting experience.
• Full‑stack engineering capability across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data.
• Proficiency in multiple languages (Python, TypeScript/Node.js, C#/.NET, Java, Go).
• Multi‑cloud experience with AWS and Azure (AI/ML ecosystems).
• Strong distributed systems, event‑driven architecture, and DevOps fundamentals.
• Experience leading teams in agile environments.
• Executive communication skills and strong business acumen.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous client environments.

Strong Differentiators

• Built internal AI engineering frameworks, accelerators, or reusable components.
• Experience advising VP/C‑suite on AI strategy and investment prioritization.
• Expertise with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI) and MCP.
• Experience with enterprise data platforms (Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.).
• AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud architecture certifications.
• Published thought leadership or conference speaking in AI/architecture.
• Industry experience in healthcare, financial services, retail, or public sector.

Compensation & Benefits:

As an employee at Launch, you will grow your skills and experience through a variety of exciting project work (across industries and technologies) with some of the top companies in the world! Our employees receive full benefits—medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, life insurance, and matched 401k. We also have an uncapped, take-what-you-need PTO policy. The anticipated base wage range for this role is $190,000 to $230,000. Education and experience will be highly considered, and we are happy to discuss your wage expectations in more detail throughout our internal interview process.