Principal Software Engineer
Cox Automotive10 days ago
Atlanta, GA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture for the AWS Quick customization layer, including connectors, agent orchestration, knowledge ingestion, service boundaries, and infrastructure as code.
- Define MCP strategies, tool contracts, governance, authentication, authorization, safety boundaries, and agent-oriented APIs.
- Own the technical direction and hardening plan for the internal AI Artifact Hub.
- Define AI quality and evaluation approaches, including regression tests, acceptance criteria, human-in-the-loop feedback, retrieval quality, and reusable agent patterns.
- Set production reliability, observability, monitoring, graceful degradation, incident response, failure recovery, idempotency, and durable workflow standards.
- Lead architecture and design reviews, guide Python implementation, mentor engineers on complex problems, and contribute targeted production code.
- Partner with AWS technical teams and cross-functional enterprise groups to align platform direction and resolve technical issues.
- Represent the platform team in technical forums and influence decisions across organizational boundaries.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 10 years of related experience, or alternative combinations including a master’s degree with 8 years, a Ph.D. with 5 years, or 22 years of related experience.
- At least 10 years of experience across software development, architecture, and platform delivery.
- Strong experience designing and delivering cloud-native platforms on AWS, including compute, storage, networking, IAM, observability, and infrastructure automation.
- Experience designing, building, or operating AI/ML-powered systems, including patterns such as RAG, knowledge retrieval, or agent-based architectures.
- Working proficiency in Python and the ability to design, review, debug, and contribute to Python-based connectors, pipelines, and tooling.
- Experience defining software evaluation and quality approaches for non-deterministic systems.
- Enterprise integration experience across SaaS, data platforms, and operational systems, including API design, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SSO, data quality, and reliability.
- Demonstrated ownership of architecture used by multiple engineering teams and experience influencing decisions without formal authority.
- Experience establishing engineering practices and team norms in a newly formed team.
- Preferred experience includes Amazon Bedrock, AWS managed AI/ML services, MCP, knowledge graphs, graph databases, Terraform, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, self-hosted runners, HITL workflows, agent orchestration, evaluation harnesses, LLM-backed middleware, Snowflake, data loss prevention, PII redaction, zero-trust data pipelines, internal developer platforms, event-driven architectures, AWS Step Functions, Temporal, and API versioning and backward compatibility.
- Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship.
- Willingness to work in the office three days per week and participate in an on-call rotation leading production incident response.
Benefits
- Executive sponsorship, direct access to AWS technical teams, and autonomy to define the architecture.
- Hybrid work arrangement requiring three days per week in the office.
- Participation in an on-call rotation and leadership of production incident response.
About Cox Automotive
Cox Automotive is the world’s largest automotive services and technology provider. Fueled by the largest breadth of first- and third-party data fed by 2.3 billion online interactions a year, Cox Automotive tailors leading solutions for car shoppers, auto manufacturers, dealers, lenders and fleets. The company has 29,000+ employees on four continents and a portfolio of industry-leading brands that include Autotrader®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, vAuto®, Dealertrack®, NextGear Capital™, CentralDispatch® and Cox Fleet®. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately owned, Atlanta-based company with $23 billion in annual revenue. Cox Automotive has been included on Glassdoor’s Best Companies in Tech & AI 2026 and Best Place to Work in 2026 lists.