Hybrid Principal Engineer, Agentic Engineering

at Zigsaw

• Job title: Principal Engineer, Agentic Engineering
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $242,634 - $499,541 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, SDLC
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Chicago, United States

About the role

• Principal Engineer at Pinterest leading the integration of AI in software development processes. Driving technical strategy for agentic engineering to transform engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive Pinterest's technical strategy for agentic engineering — building the platform where AI agents write code, review pull requests, debug production incidents, and orchestrate development workflows across 3,000+ engineers
• Architect and ship production systems — modular agent runtimes, persistent memory, multi-agent orchestration (planner, executor, reviewer, tool agents), sandbox isolation, evaluation pipelines, governance (trust boundaries, code generation policies, credential protection, audit trails), and enterprise-grade security
• Reimagine Pinterest's SDLC — transforming coding, testing, reviewing, deploying, and monitoring into an AI-native lifecycle where humans move from "in the loop" to "on the loop"
• Own developer velocity measurement — telemetry, benchmarking, and evaluation systems that track agent quality, reliability, cost, and engineering throughput, building structured feedback loops that compound toward order-of-magnitude velocity gains
• Serve as technical force multiplier across Platform, Infrastructure, and Engineering Acceleration — integrating AI-native workflows with Pinterest's monorepo tooling, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and code quality systems while providing architectural direction, making disciplined build-vs-buy decisions, and setting quality standards through reference implementations
• Drive engineering-wide adoption — through compelling prototypes, reference architectures, technical evangelism, and documentation that makes the abstract concrete
• Build strategic relationships with AI platform vendors — such as Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Google and contribute to open-source agentic frameworks to keep Pinterest at the leading edge
• Translate ambiguous business opportunities into precise engineering investments with strong product sensibility — building platforms with the developer experience and adoption characteristics that generate real impact
• Serve as key technical advisor and delegation point — working with the Sr. Director, Engineering Acceleration, VP, Infrastructure, and Chief Architect — shaping investment priorities and multi-year technical direction

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in building developer platforms, internal tooling, or engineering infrastructure that measurably changed how engineers work at scale
• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and shipping agentic AI systems in production — including knowledge and context engineering, persistent memory architectures, multi-agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph), tool integration, and production observability for AI systems
• Experience working in large-scale monorepos or complex multi-service codebases and understanding the unique tooling, navigation, and developer workflow challenges they create
• Familiarity with agentic development best practices — AGENTS.md conventions, skills frameworks, prompt engineering for code agents, and hands-on experience accelerating developer velocity through AI-powered IDEs and local agentic workflows
• Track record of driving sweeping technical change across large engineering organizations (500+ engineers) without direct authority — through compelling vision, high-quality reference implementations, and credibility earned from shipping systems that work
• Deep understanding of modern SDLC tooling and workflows: code review systems, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, static analysis, and the judgment to know how these systems must evolve when AI becomes a first-class participant
• Exceptional cross-functional influence and communication skills — comfortable operating across Security, Infrastructure, Platform, and Product Engineering. Able to handle complex technical conversations at any level, from staff engineers to CTO
• Strong product sensibility and business judgment — ability to convert ambiguous opportunities into precise technical direction, understand developer needs before they're articulated, and build platforms that developers want to adopt
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field or equivalent experience.

Benefits

• Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.