Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Boston, MA, USA; hybrid

Base salary: $190,500–$300,000 per year, plus potential equity, bonus, and 401k eligibility.

Company

hirify.global is an e-commerce company providing pet products, services, care, and guidance for pet parents and partners.

What you will do

• Set the long-term technical vision and architectural strategy for Customer Care across customer experiences, agent tools, AI capabilities, and shared platforms.
• Lead cross-organizational initiatives including the Unified Agent Workspace, Customer Care platform modernization, and AI-powered customer and agent experiences.
• Design scalable, resilient, and extensible cloud-native systems using distributed architectures, APIs, event-driven integrations, and enterprise platforms.
• Drive AI platform architecture for conversational AI, agent assistance, knowledge retrieval, intelligent workflow automation, and reusable orchestration patterns.
• Establish engineering standards for system design, testing, observability, security, reliability, and operational excellence while mentoring senior technical talent.
• Partner with engineering, data science, product, and business leaders on technical strategy, investment decisions, build-versus-buy analysis, and measurable outcomes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems and enterprise platforms.
• Experience operating as a Principal Engineer, senior architect, or equivalent technical leader across multiple engineering teams or business domains.
• Proven success establishing technical vision and delivering complex, ambiguous, cross-organizational initiatives from architecture through implementation.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, microservices, event-driven systems, APIs, and modern software design patterns.
• Strong experience with AWS or comparable cloud platforms and designing highly available, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient systems.
• Experience architecting or integrating AI/ML-enabled applications, including conversational AI, LLM-based solutions, AI orchestration, or intelligent automation.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, observability, DevOps, production reliability, legacy modernization, and migration strategy.
• Ability to make pragmatic architectural trade-offs, communicate with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, influence without direct authority, resolve disagreements, and mentor senior engineers while remaining hands-on.

Nice to have

• Experience in e-commerce or retail and high-volume, transaction-intensive customer-facing applications.
• Experience with contact center platforms such as Genesys, CRM systems, omnichannel engagement, and agent workflow applications.
• Experience designing AI-powered customer service solutions, including virtual agents, agent assist, retrieval-augmented generation, and knowledge management platforms.
• Experience with enterprise AI platforms, LLM orchestration, vector databases, AI evaluation or observability frameworks, and large-scale legacy replacement programs.
• Familiarity with security, compliance, privacy, and governance for enterprise AI systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work environment with a culture focused on growth, collaboration, inclusion, and delivering results.
• Medical, dental, vision, wellness, life, disability, telemedicine, and flexible spending benefits.
• Parental leave, family services, backup dependent care, employee assistance, and pet-related benefits and discounts.
• Unlimited PTO for exempt salary team members, subject to manager approval, plus six paid holidays and applicable paid sick and family leave.
• Team Member Resource Groups, company events, programs, and opportunities to build connections across a diverse workforce.