Principal Software Engineering Manager
Redmond, WAJobPosted 1 day agoStill listed today
Most applications go out cold — see where you stand first. No sign-up to start.
You apply on the employer's site, with no Olive account needed.
Watch jobs like this. New roles like this one near Redmond, WA, by email.
Don't just apply. Show up ready.
Olive works from this exact posting.
At a glance
Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.
Job overview
The Principal Software Engineering Manager will lead a team building foundational Perception Platform capabilities and set engineering strategy for production-grade AI platform services. The role spans generative AI, retrieval and RAG, agentic systems, multi-tenant architecture, identity and security, automation, reliability, and live-site operations. It also includes cross-organizational execution, technical communication, and developing engineering talent.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
Lead, build, and grow a high-performing engineering team responsible for foundational Perception Platform capabilities, fostering an inclusive culture centered on technical excellence, customer impact, accountability, learning, collaboration, and strong engineering ownership. Define and drive the engineering strategy, architecture, and execution for production-grade AI platform capabilities spanning generative AI, retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), memory, reasoning, model interaction, agent orchestration, execution, evaluation, extensibility, security, and safety. This includes scalable RAG architectures covering ingestion, indexing, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, context construction, grounding, provenance, re-ranking, retrieval evaluation, and appropriate tenant and authorization boundaries. Provide technical leadership for agentic and multi-agent AI systems, including planning, reasoning, tool use, task decomposition and delegation, agent collaboration, state and memory management, human-in-the-loop patterns, failure recovery, and bounded autonomous execution. Design scalable, secure, multi-tenant platform architectures with clear engineering principles for tenant isolation, identity boundaries, authentication, authorization, configuration, data protection, deployment, and operations. Drive identity and access patterns across user, workload, service, and agent identities, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), delegated authorization, least-privilege access, and secure propagation of identity and authorization context across distributed and agentic workflows. Partner with Principal engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders to establish reusable platform abstractions and architectural patterns across compute, storage, networking, identity, configuration, deployment, observability, and service integration. Identify systemic dependencies and evolve existing production services toward reusable, configurable, loosely coupled, and scalable architectures that reduce tenant-specific dependencies and improve engineering leverage across teams. Drive an automation-first strategy for platform deployment and operations, including tenant provisioning, configuration, deployment, validation, upgrades, migrations, and operational readiness. Build for differences in tenant configuration, service availability, infrastructure topology, networking, identity, security, sovereignty, and compliance requirements while avoiding unnecessary tenant-specific coupling throughout the application stack. Ensure security, authorization, tenant isolation, quality, and reliability are maintained end-to-end across AI retrieval, reasoning, planning, and execution. Establish automated testing and validation mechanisms that verify functional correctness, tenant isolation, authorization, security, configuration, deployment readiness, compatibility, and reliability across heterogeneous environments, including validation of agent-generated plans and tool calls against applicable security, safety, authorization, and compliance policies. Own service health, reliability, security, observability, and live-site excellence for the team's platform capabilities. Establish monitoring, diagnostics, and operational practices that enable teams to understand platform health, detect systemic issues, isolate tenant-specific failures, troubleshoot distributed services and AI workflows, prevent incidents, rapidly mitigate issues, perform root cause analysis, learn from failures, and systematically eliminate recurring operational problems. Translate long-term technical strategy into clear priorities and execution plans, balancing customer commitments, platform investments, architectural improvements, operational excellence, security, technical debt, and engineering velocity. Use engineering signals, operational metrics, customer feedback, and business priorities to continuously improve platform reliability, engineering productivity, team effectiveness, and customer outcomes. Partner across engineering, product, design, security, privacy, compliance, infrastructure, and partner organizations to align dependencies, resolve ambiguity, manage technical risk, and drive complex cross-organizational initiatives to completion. Communicate technical strategy, architectural tradeoffs, risks, priorities, and execution status effectively to engineering teams, partner organizations, and senior leadership. Develop and retain strong engineering talent and future technical leaders through recruiting, coaching, mentoring, feedback, delegation, and meaningful growth opportunities. Create an environment where engineers can own complex problems, make high-quality technical decisions, and grow into broader roles. Establish and reinforce strong engineering standards and mechanisms across architecture, design reviews, coding quality, security, testing, deployment, operational readiness, and production excellence Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, Go, JavaScript, or Python These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings: Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, Go, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, Go, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. Experience leading the design, development, and operation of large-scale multi-tenant distributed systems, cloud services, enterprise platforms, or AI-powered services in production environments. Strong architectural judgment and experience partnering with senior and Principal engineers to make complex technical decisions and drive architectural convergence across multiple teams. Experience leading systems with strong tenant isolation across identity, authorization, data, compute, configuration, and operational boundaries. Experience with Infrastructure as Code, automated provisioning, deployment systems, configuration management, and CI/CD for large-scale cloud services. Experience building organizational and technical strategies around reusable abstractions for cloud infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, identity, configuration, and platform dependencies. Experience with Kubernetes and containerized service architectures, including deployment, networking, scaling, configuration, capacity management, and operational troubleshooting. Experience building and operating highly available and resilient distributed services and designing for dependency failures, capacity constraints, infrastructure differences, and large-scale live-site operations. Experience with identity, authentication, authorization, RBAC, least-privilege principles, scoped permissions, delegated authorization, and multi-tenant isolation. Experience establishing observability, health monitoring, deployment validation, operational readiness, incident management, and engineering quality mechanisms for large-scale distributed services. Experience with Generative AI and AI systems, including model orchestration, retrieval/RAG, semantic search, memory, context management, tool use, evaluation, safety, agentic systems, or production operationalization. Experience identifying architectural coupling and leading organizations in evolving existing production systems toward reusable, configurable, and scalable platform architectures. Experience managing complex cross-team and cross-organizational engineering programs, including ambiguous requirements, architectural dependencies, competing priorities, and long-term platform investments. Strategic technical communication and leadership skills, with experience influencing engineering, product, security, privacy, compliance, infrastructure, and partner organizations. Demonstrated ability to balance technical strategy, people leadership, customer impact, operational excellence, and predictable execution while operating in a complex and rapidly evolving environment.
How this job compares
Set against the 1,241 open Software Engineering Manager jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 7, 2026.
- Pay
- This postingNot listed
- Washington median$175–278K/yr65 salary ranges
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 76 open Software Engineering Manager jobs in Washington and 1,241 across the US. 4% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Hiring the most in Washington
- Google12 open
- Microsoft Corporation10 open
- Amazon6 open
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 6 years of experience; Software Engineering Manager postings that state a minimum ask for 8 years at the median (1,078 postings).
- Education
- 416 of the 1,241 open Software Engineering Manager jobs (34%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 7, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
Prepare for this role
You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.
