Principal AI-Native Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Onsite five days per week in Alpharetta, Georgia; Middletown, New Jersey; Bothell, Washington; Plano, Texas; Dallas, Texas; or Atlanta, Georgia. No relocation is offered.

Salary: $155,400–$261,100 USD annually.

Company

AT&T is a large telecommunications corporation developing enterprise software and AI-enabled automation solutions.

What you will do

• Design and build production-grade AI applications, Python backend services, and REST APIs using FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
• Create agentic AI workflows with tool calling, routing, planning, execution, multi-step processes, state management, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Translate ambiguous business needs into technical designs and working solutions with business and technical stakeholders in a 2-in-a-box model.
• Integrate AI applications with enterprise APIs, databases, event streams, service gateways, and internal platforms.
• Design secure and reliable tool and service contracts, evaluation strategies, guardrails, release gates, and grounding solutions including RAG and vector search.
• Implement secure-by-design practices, observability, automated testing, CI/CD, Docker deployment, and resilient distributed-system patterns.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and delivering production applications or services.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong Python development experience, ideally with FastAPI, Flask, or Django, plus REST API and backend or microservice architecture experience.
• Experience integrating applications with enterprise platforms, databases, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and relational databases; NoSQL or document database experience is beneficial.
• Experience with unit, integration, and automated testing, CI/CD, code review, and refactoring.
• Experience with Docker and deployment into cloud or enterprise environments.
• Knowledge of structured logging, metrics, tracing, performance analysis, incident troubleshooting, secure API development, authentication, authorization, secrets management, least privilege, and audit logging.
• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or Generative AI capabilities, tool or function calling, structured prompting, output validation, RAG, retrieval, or other grounding techniques into software applications.
• Demonstrated use of AI coding assistants throughout the software development lifecycle, with strong communication and technical decision-making skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with LangGraph or comparable agent orchestration frameworks and multi-agent or multi-step agentic workflows.
• Experience with Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or comparable workflow technologies.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures using Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pub/Sub, or comparable technologies.
• Production experience with RAG, embeddings, semantic or vector search, and vector databases.
• Experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, API gateways, service mesh technologies, reusable SDKs, internal developer platforms, AI tool libraries, or reference architectures.
• Experience with Angular or another modern JavaScript or TypeScript front-end framework.

Culture & Benefits

• Regular full-time employment with a 40-hour work week and onsite work at the designated location.
• Medical, dental, vision, disability, life, and accidental death insurance, plus supplemental benefits and employee assistance programs.
• 401(k), tuition reimbursement, paid time off, at least 23 vacation days annually, and 9 company-designated holidays.
• Paid parental leave, paid caregiver leave, adoption reimbursement, and wellness programs.
• Employee discounts of up to 50% on eligible AT&T mobility, internet, fiber, and phone products.