Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Chicago, United States of America

Illinois base salary: $244,000–$253,500 per year

Company

hirify.global is a mealtime platform that combines dishes from 20+ exclusive restaurants in one order and operates the dining experience, culinary production, and supporting technology.

What you will do

• Set the architecture and technical direction for AI-native developer tooling, including context aggregation, MCPs/CLIs, skills, sub-agents, autonomous development agents, and cloud agent solutions.
• Build integrations that provide AI coding tools with sanctioned access to codebases, services, and systems, including appropriate access controls and guardrails.
• Define practical standards for AI-assisted code generation, review, testing, documentation, refactoring, and incident management.
• Design pre-review and triage tooling that automates mechanical and policy checks before human review.
• Define systems for model selection and AI-cost optimization, measure developer velocity, and connect AI spend to engineering outcomes.
• Coordinate delivery across platform, infrastructure, application, and engineering leadership teams while mentoring senior engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including recent hands-on work with LLM-based tooling such as agents, MCP servers, or coding assistants.
• Direct experience integrating AI tools into development workflows such as code review, testing, code generation, or documentation beyond individual end-user usage, ideally at organizational scale.
• Strong system design skills and experience owning tools or platforms end to end, from design through adoption across multiple teams.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs, webhooks, or other integration and message-based systems.
• Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, CI/CD systems, or other software primarily used by engineers.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, a pragmatic approach to problem solving, and the ability to troubleshoot complex technical obstacles.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, including leading technical discussions with engineers and leaders up to the senior director level.

Nice to have

• Experience with Java/JVM and/or Python.
• Experience bringing proven AI-tooling developer patterns and practices from outside the organization.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with equity and a 401(k).
• Medical, dental, and vision plan options, plus company-paid short- and long-term disability coverage.
• Paid time off, flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, and paid sick leave as required by applicable law.
• Paid parental leave, discounted meals, and exclusive perks across the hirify.global family of brands.
• Benefits, eligibility, effective dates, and plan options vary by employment classification and location.

Hiring process

• Interviews are scheduled and candidacy information is shared by email or text.
• Interview accommodations can be requested from the recruiter.