Principal Software Engineer, AI
New York City, NY · 10+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 13, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 10+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- New York City, NY
About the role
- PermitFlow is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, AI to build the core product AI Assistant, infrastructure, and workflow agents.
- This role requires UX and technical acumen to deliver high quality agents in a complex domain while up-leveling core agentic infrastructure and data flywheel.
Responsibilities
- Own the agent architecture, including designing the reasoning loop, planning and decomposition strategy, state and session model, and recovery behavior for long-running tasks.
- Build the context layer covering retrieval, memory, and context-window management over project documents, jurisdictional requirements, prior submissions, and customer-specific conventions.
- Design the action surface by defining the tools the assistant can call, the permissions model around them, and the human-in-the-loop checkpoints for actions that are expensive or irreversible.
- Make evaluation the engine of progress by standing up offline and online eval harnesses that measure task completion and failure modes, and building the iteration loop.
- Set the bar for the organization by establishing the abstractions, SDKs, and review standards other engineers build agentic features on.
- Stay close to the customer by sitting with permit coordinators and builders, watching the assistant fail in real conditions, and bringing that back into the system design.
Requirements
- Shipped an assistant or agentic product at meaningful scale.
- Deep, current knowledge of the agentic stack including tool calling and tool design, context engineering, memory, retrieval, and orchestration patterns.
- Built eval harnesses that changed what a team worked on and ability to articulate what makes an eval trustworthy.
- Strong software engineer with experience owning services in production.
- Operate with earned authority, influencing through demonstrated judgment, working code, and clear writing.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with recent time spent building LLM-powered products.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth company
- 100% company-paid base medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees + healthcare FSA
- 401(k) savings plan
- Unlimited PTO and paid family leave
- Home office & equipment stipend
- Daily in-office lunch and dinner provided
- Commuter benefits (pre-tax transit and parking)
Workplace
- Hybrid schedule with 3 in-office days per week at the New York City headquarters.
Skills
- LLM
- Agentic Stack
- Tool Calling
- Context Engineering
- Retrieval
- Memory
- Orchestration Patterns
