Principal Software Engineer (Physical AI, Autonomy & Data Platform Engineering)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (Physical AI, Autonomy & Data Platform Engineering): Lead technical strategy and hands-on engineering execution for large-scale data ingestion and processing platforms supporting physical AI and autonomous systems, with an accent on scalable cloud-native architectures and streaming/batch sensor data pipelines. Focus on designing reusable data platform capabilities (Bronze/Silver/Gold), driving engineering excellence across distributed agile teams, and ensuring reliability, observability, security, and cost-optimized performance under rapidly evolving technical requirements.

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Salary: $159,120.00 - $258,570.00

Company

hirify.global builds industrial solutions and technology platforms for real-world applications.

What you will do

• Lead frontier engineering efforts for physical AI, autonomy, and next-generation sensor-driven systems in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments.
• Design and oversee scalable ingestion pipelines for LiDAR, radar, video, image, and vehicle telematics data.
• Architect and optimize Bronze/Silver/Gold data layer pipelines for both streaming and batch workloads, enabling downstream analytics, AI/ML, and computer vision use cases.
• Build cloud-native distributed systems on AWS (and optionally Azure/GCP), including microservices and event-driven processing.
• Drive engineering excellence across distributed scrum teams: technical strategy, design reviews, sprint planning, governance, and alignment to platform architecture.
• Ensure pipelines and platforms are performant, fault tolerant, observable, secure, and cost optimized; establish metadata/lineage/governance standards.

Requirements

• Based in Chicago and able to work onsite five days a week.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with significant experience in principal/staff/lead-level technical leadership roles.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and/or Java.
• Deep expertise in system design, distributed systems, and large-scale cloud-native architectures.
• Strong experience designing and implementing enterprise-scale streaming and batch data processing systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud services and architecture patterns; experience with Azure or GCP is valued.

Nice to have

• Experience with sensor/telemetry domains such as LiDAR, radar, video, imagery, IoT, or vehicle telematics.
• Familiarity with data lake/lakehouse architectures and medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) modeling patterns.
• Experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Spark, Flink, Airflow, Databricks, EMR, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes; observability and SRE/platform reliability practices.
• Experience with AI/ML, autonomous systems, computer vision, robotics, advanced analytics, and sensor fusion pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Onsite role with five days per week in Chicago.
• Relocation assistance available.
• Visa sponsorship available for eligible applicants.
• Comprehensive benefits including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, 401(k), HSA, FSAs, disability and life insurance, parental leave, and tuition reimbursement.
• Career development support and incentive bonus (subject to plan eligibility).

Hiring process

• Interviews to evaluate technical leadership, architecture, and experience with data platforms and distributed systems.
• Drug screen required as part of employment conditions.