DVT is looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer to lead the technical implementation of AI augmented software engineering across a large and complex engineering environment.

This is a senior individual contributor position, equivalent in influence to a Head of Engineering, but without direct line management responsibility. The successful candidate will remain deeply hands on, writing production code, building engineering tooling and setting technical standards across multiple development teams and technology stacks.

The role will be responsible for designing and implementing the engineering foundations required for safe, measurable and repeatable AI assisted software delivery. This includes agent scaffolding, retrieval and context layers, prompt and workflow libraries, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, developer tooling and engineering telemetry.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

Design and build platforms supporting AI assisted software development

Develop agentic workflows, retrieval solutions, context layers and evaluation frameworks

Integrate AI capabilities into developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines

Establish guardrails and engineering standards for AI generated code

Create integration patterns across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments

Build telemetry to measure delivery, quality, defects and productivity

Evaluate AI models, platforms, tools and third party services

Lead technical reviews, prototypes and architecture discussions

Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across multiple teams

Ensure solutions meet security, regulatory and data protection requirements

Technical Requirements

10 or more years of software engineering experience

Proven hands on delivery at senior, staff or principal level

Deep production experience in at least two of the following:

Java, .NET, React, Flutter

Working knowledge of the remaining technology stacks

Strong AWS and cloud native architecture experience

Experience with microservices, event driven systems, APIs and CI/CD

Experience building internal platforms or developer tooling used across multiple teams

AI Engineering Requirements

Practical experience building and shipping AI enabled engineering solutions

Large language model application patterns

Agentic workflows and tool use

Retrieval augmented generation and context engineering

Prompt and workflow design

Model evaluation and benchmarking

Evaluation harnesses, regression testing and guardrails

Understanding of generative AI security, safety and production failure modes

Advisory or strategy experience without practical implementation will not be sufficient.

Leadership Requirements

Proven technical leadership across multiple teams

Ability to influence without direct authority

Strong mentoring and engineering enablement skills

Ability to communicate technical decisions to technical and business stakeholders

Confidence to defend technical decisions under commercial pressure

Qualifications

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering or a related field.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a deeply technical Principal Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI engineering experience.

You should be comfortable writing production code, building platforms for other engineers, working across different technology stacks and influencing technical direction at organisational level.

You will be expected to solve problems where no established implementation pattern exists and where decisions carry significant operational, security and regulatory consequences.

This role is best suited to someone who wants broad technical influence while continuing to build, prototype, test and ship working software.

** Principal Engineer role is positioned as a senior individual contributor at Head of Engineering equivalence.

The role carries no headcount, budget authority or line management responsibility.

Its seniority derives from its technical influence across the engineering environment and its accountability for delivering the technical foundation of the organisation’s transformation.

Principal Java Engineer: AI Augmentation and Engineering Systems