Principal AI-Native Engineer

About Ionic Partners

Ionic Partners is a holding company with a portfolio of operating businesses. We are not adding AI features to products or rolling assistants out to employees. We are rebuilding the operating systems of entire business functions — engineering, support, finance, marketing, revenue operations — as agentic systems that do the work, in production, every day.

Role Overview

We are looking for Principal AI-Native Engineers to build them. This is not a plan we are pitching. Agents already write and review code inside our engineering pipeline. Our own orchestration framework is what those systems run on, and it is on its second generation because the first one taught us what breaks.

Responsibilities

• Partner with subject-matter experts across the portfolio companies to turn functional specs into agentic system designs, pressure-testing scope and surfacing failure modes before build.
• Design agent architectures: agent boundaries, orchestration and control flow, tool surfaces, state and memory, human-in-the-loop placement, and the split between model-driven and deterministic logic.
• Build, ship, and operate production agentic systems that run real business functions end to end.
• Extend and harden the in-house orchestration framework — execution control, integrations, permissioning, observability, failure, and recovery behavior — so each build raises the floor for the next.
• Improve the automated development and QA agents already running inside our engineering pipeline.
• Create and maintain machine-readable context artifacts covering products, customers, processes, and operational data, and keep them current as the businesses change.
• Design retrieval and context-assembly strategies, manage context budgets, and treat prompting as versioned, tested, measured engineering.
• Integrate agentic systems with live business platforms — product codebases, CRMs, ERPs, support desks, data warehouses, and internal services — including auth, permissioning, rate and cost limits, idempotency, and blast-radius controls.
• Define success criteria and build eval harnesses, baselines, regression suites, and human review sampling where automated scoring is insufficient.
• Instrument systems with tracing and observability that make agent behavior diagnosable in production.
• Build guardrails, fallbacks, retries, circuit breakers, approval gates, audit trails, and rollback paths proportional to what a system can affect.
• Track and control token and tool cost per unit of work, and design for unit economics that hold at full volume rather than pilot volume.
• Monitor eval trendlines, cost curves, and failure patterns for systems in production, and act on what they show.
• Investigate and resolve regressions, incidents, and quality drift in systems you own.
• Evolve deployed systems as the business processes they serve change.
• Ramp quickly into large, unfamiliar production codebases across our companies and extend them safely rather than working around them.
• Extract reusable components, patterns, and abstractions from solved problems so recurring classes of work get cheaper across functions and companies.
• Evaluate emerging models, frameworks, agentic techniques, and tooling against real workloads, and make adoption calls based on measured results rather than capability claims.
• Define and apply practices for responsible autonomous operation: data exposure, IP protection, security boundaries, and human review requirements.
• Review agentic work built elsewhere in the organization and raise the technical standard through direct engagement and demonstrated results.
• Work alongside engineers and operators whose day-to-day work these systems change, explaining behavior, limits, and intent.
• Retire systems and approaches that measurement shows are not delivering, and document why.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 3+ years building AI-Native or agentic systems that reached production and were used for real work.
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: systems you designed, built, shipped, and then operated and improved over time.
• Experience integrating AI systems with the platforms a business actually runs on.
• Experience designing and running evaluations for non-deterministic systems.
• Experience operating LLM-based systems in production.
• Experience in becoming productive quickly inside large, complex codebases you did not write.
• Experience working from specifications or requirements set by domain experts outside your own area of expertise.
• Experience with platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling work.
• People management experience is not required and is not an advantage.
• Ownership, autonomy, intellectual honesty, judgment, adaptability, collaboration, communication, curiosity with discipline, and high standards.

Nice to Have

• Experience building agentic systems in enterprise environments.
• Experience making a non-engineering business function agentic.
• Experience building shared platform or framework layers.
• Experience with enterprise SaaS, ERP systems, or mission-critical business applications.
• Experience applying agentic development or QA workflows inside a real engineering pipeline.
• Experience modernizing or extending complex legacy systems using AI-assisted approaches.
• Experience working across multiple companies, business units, or product lines.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed organization.
• Open-source contributions, technical writing, or public work on agentic systems.

Benefits

• Access to frontier models, agentic tooling, and infrastructure without procurement friction.
• A live production agentic platform to inherit and extend.
• Unusual breadth of problem domains.
• A principal-level individual contributor path with real scope and autonomy.
• 100% remote and global work environment.
• Flexible work hours.
• Dedicated growth support and feedback.
• Introductions to thought leaders and webinars on cutting-edge tech.
• Stipend to help set up your ideal home office.
• Focus on culture: coffee chats, happy hours, cooking classes, book clubs, and more!