Principal AI-Native Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal AI-Native Engineer (AI): Build and operate production agentic systems that run core business functions across a portfolio of operating companies, with an accent on orchestration, evaluation, reliability, and unit economics. Focus on designing autonomous workflows, integrating live enterprise platforms, and solving failure, safety, observability, and cost challenges at scale.

Location: Remote, available to candidates in Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, or Poland

Company

Holding company Ionic Partners operates a portfolio of businesses and builds shared agentic systems for engineering, support, finance, marketing, and revenue operations.

What you will do

• Partner with domain experts to turn functional specifications into reliable agentic system designs.
• Design agent boundaries, orchestration, tools, memory, human review, and deterministic control logic.
• Build, ship, operate, and continuously improve production agentic systems.
• Extend the in-house orchestration framework and integrate agents with codebases, CRMs, ERPs, support platforms, warehouses, and internal services.
• Create context artifacts, retrieval strategies, evaluation harnesses, regression suites, tracing, observability, guardrails, and recovery paths.
• Monitor quality, incidents, cost, and business outcomes while extracting reusable patterns across companies.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant engineering or computer science field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 3+ years building AI-native or agentic systems that reached production and supported real work.
• End-to-end ownership of AI systems, including integrations, authentication, permissions, safety controls, failures, maintenance, and cost management.
• Experience evaluating non-deterministic and LLM-based systems through harnesses, baselines, regression detection, tracing, and diagnostics.
• Strong autonomy, judgment, communication, adaptability, and collaboration with non-technical domain experts; people management is not required.

Nice to have

• Enterprise agentic systems experience involving legacy systems, compliance, security reviews, or sensitive data.
• Experience making support, finance, marketing, revenue operations, or another business function agentic.
• Experience building shared platforms, enterprise SaaS, ERP systems, or mission-critical applications.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering or QA workflows, legacy modernization, open source, technical writing, or public agentic systems work.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% remote and global work with flexible hours and an asynchronous operating model.
• Access to frontier models, agentic tooling, infrastructure, and authority over technology choices.
• Principal-level individual contributor path with broad scope, autonomy, and no management requirement.
• Growth support through feedback, career development, expert introductions, webinars, and advanced tools.
• Home-office stipend and community activities including coffee chats, happy hours, cooking classes, and book clubs.

Hiring process

• Interviewed candidates receive the hiring decision within 45 days of their interview.