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About the Role

Cox Automotive is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the technical direction for an enterprise AI platform on AWS Quick, including its applications and integrations. This hands-on technical leadership role involves making key architecture and engineering decisions, leading engineers, and contributing to code. The team builds connectors, agents, knowledge bases, and data pipelines that integrate the platform with core enterprise tools.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end architecture for the AWS Quick customization layer, including connectors, agent orchestration, knowledge ingestion, service boundaries, and infrastructure as code.
Define the Model Context Protocol (MCP) strategy for enterprise integrations: tool contracts, governance, authentication, authorization, and safety boundaries.
Own the technical direction of the AI Artifact Hub, assessing its current state, defining a hardening plan, and improving reliability.
Make and document major architecture decisions, including trade-offs, balancing near-term delivery with future platform evolution.
Work with Enterprise Architecture, Security, Cloud Automation, and AWS technical teams to align platform direction and resolve cross-team issues.
Own the quality and evaluation approach for AI capabilities, including automated regression tests, measurable acceptance criteria, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) feedback.
Lead technical decisions around enterprise knowledge and retrieval, including ingestion, content curation, metadata, knowledge graphs, retrieval quality, context management, and platform-supported RAG configuration.
Define standards and reusable patterns for agents and skills.
Set the design for MCP servers, tool interfaces, and structured APIs intended for agent use.
Establish spec-driven, verification-first practices for AI-assisted software development.
Evaluate new capabilities and adopt them when they improve delivery without weakening quality or security.
Set production reliability standards for AI-enabled integrations, including monitoring, observability, graceful degradation, and incident response.
Define failure and recovery patterns: timeouts, bounded retries with backoff, circuit breakers, and clear fallback behavior.
Define idempotency and durable workflow patterns for operations that cross service or third-party boundaries.
Lead response to significant platform incidents and drive the follow-up engineering work.
Lead architecture and design reviews.
Pair with engineers on the hardest problems and raise the team’s engineering judgment.
Guide the team’s Python implementation through design, code review, debugging, and targeted production contributions.
Serve as a senior technical contact for AWS on platform architecture, product capabilities, and roadmap needs.
Explain technical direction and trade-offs clearly to engineering, product, security, and senior leadership.
Represent the platform team in cross-organization technical forums and build alignment across team boundaries.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 10 years’ experience in a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
10+ years of experience across the software development life cycle, architecture, and platform delivery.
Strong experience designing and delivering cloud-native platforms on AWS, including compute, storage, networking, IAM, observability, and infrastructure automation.
Experience designing, building, or operating AI/ML-powered systems, with exposure to emerging patterns such as RAG, knowledge retrieval, or agent-based architectures.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and working proficiency in Python.
Able to design, review, debug, and contribute to Python-based connectors, pipelines, and tooling.
Experience defining evaluation and quality approaches for software, including regression testing, measurable acceptance criteria, HITL review, or other methods suited to non-deterministic systems.
A track record of enterprise integration work across SaaS, data platforms, and operational systems, including API design, authentication (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SSO), data quality, and reliability concerns.
Demonstrated ownership of a platform or system architecture used by multiple engineering teams.
Experience setting technical direction and influencing decisions across team boundaries without relying on formal authority.
Experience establishing engineering practices and team norms in a newly formed team.
Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship.
Ability to work in the office three days per week.
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation and lead incident response for production platform systems.
Must clear a pre-employment drug test (marijuana pre-employment drug test not administered for this position).

Skills

Python
AWS
Cloud-native platforms
AI/ML-powered systems
RAG
Knowledge retrieval
Agent-based architectures
Enterprise integration
API design
OAuth 2.0
OIDC
SSO
Data quality
Reliability
Amazon Bedrock
AWS managed AI/ML services
MCP specification
Knowledge graphs
Graph databases
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
HITL workflows
Agent orchestration
LLM-backed middleware
Snowflake
Data loss prevention
PII redaction
Zero-trust data pipelines
Internal developer platforms
Event-driven architectures
AWS Step Functions
Temporal

Location

USA
Hybrid

Work Type

Hybrid
Onsite
Remote

Experience Level

Principal
Director
10+ years

Education Level

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science
Master’s degree
Ph.D.

Salary/Compensations

$163,400.00 - $272,300.00

Benefits

Flexible vacation with pay
Seven paid holidays
Up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually
Bereavement leave
Time off to vote
Jury duty leave
Volunteer time off
Military leave
Parental leave
Health care insurance (medical, dental, vision)
Retirement planning (401(k))
Paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO)

About the Company

Cox Automotive is transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers.
Employees work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim.
The company offers a people-centered atmosphere.

Equal Opportunity

Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.
EOE, including disability/vets