Principal Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI): Building and optimizing the Kibana backend architecture for the Agent Builder conversational platform with an accent on streaming APIs, secure tool execution, and session persistence. Focus on designing high-throughput event-driven pipelines, establishing reliability standards, and integrating LLM orchestration frameworks.

Location: Must be based in United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Portugal, Spain, or Sweden

Company

The Search AI Company enabling real-time data search and AI intelligence at scale for over 50% of the Fortune 500.

What you will do

• Own the architecture for chat back-end services using Node/TypeScript, defining service boundaries and scalability targets.
• Lead cross-team design reviews and author ADRs/RFCs that set standards for AI-chat and ingestion work.
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines to capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops.
• Define error budgets and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads to ensure system reliability.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers to grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust culture.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to implement multi-step reasoning and tool calling capabilities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building distributed production SaaS services.
• 5+ years of experience leading large-scale Node/TypeScript backend stacks.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals (shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, circuit-breakers).
• Proven success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs using gRPC, REST, and WebSockets.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry and SLO dashboards.
• Must be based in UK, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Portugal, Spain, or Sweden.

Nice to have

• Contribution history to Kibana or other large single-page applications (SPAs).
• Ability to prototype front-end dashboards to unblock back-end development.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive pay based on role impact rather than previous salary.
• Health coverage for employees and their families in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules within a distributed company environment.
• Generous annual vacation allowance and a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.
• Company matching for financial donations up to $2000.
• Up to 40 hours per year dedicated to volunteer projects.