About this role
Summary: The Software Principal Engineer leads the integration of autonomous AI agents into the software development lifecycle, focusing on hands-on experimentation, evaluation, and validation. This role involves building proof-of-concept platforms, defining guardrails for safe agent autonomy, and integrating AI-driven work...
Software Principal Engineer – Autonomous AI Software Engineering
Software engineering is being reshaped by autonomous AI agents that can plan, write, test, and review code with increasing independence. Our team works at the forefront of that shift, bringing agent-driven autonomy into the software development lifecycle so that engineers set direction and make key decisions while agents handle more execution.
Because the agent landscape evolves rapidly, we stay hands-on: exploring the most promising approaches, proving them with rigorous experiments on real engineering work, and turning successful patterns into standard development practices. We are a small, AI-native team operating like a startup—prioritizing high autonomy, rapid experimentation, and daily human-AI collaboration.
Join us to do the best work of your career and make a profound impact as a Software Principal Engineer on our AI Governance Engineering team in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. This is an onsite role.
What You'll Achieve
You will be the hands-on engineer who turns autonomous agents from impressive demos into dependable engineering practice. You will set up and run proofs of concept of agent platforms and approaches against real codebases and tasks, measure objectively what they can and cannot do, and integrate viable solutions into our development lifecycle—operating within the architecture and evaluation framework defined by our architect.
You will spend most of your time building and experimenting (70%+), using AI agents as a core part of your daily workflow.
### Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities:
- Run hands-on proofs of concept and pilots of autonomous software-engineering agents and agent platforms, from environment setup and integration through results, on representative real-world engineering work
- Build evaluation harnesses: realistic task suites, benchmarks, and metrics for output quality, level of autonomy, reliability, speed, cost, and security, enabling fair and repeatable comparisons
- Verify and validate agent output using automated tests, mutation testing, static and security analysis, acceptance-criteria checks, and calibrated human review to identify failure points
- Integrate agents into the engineering toolchain (source control, CI/CD, issue tracking, specifications, and quality gates) via APIs, MCP, and custom tools, building extensions where standard solutions fall short
- Increase autonomy safely by implementing guardrails, sandboxing, observability (traces and replay), and feedback loops, helping engineering teams adopt agent-driven workflows with confidence
Technologies You'll Work With:
- Agents and LLMs: Commercial and open-source autonomous coding agents, agent frameworks, frontier and open-weight models, LLM gateways, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Engineering: Python, TypeScript / Node.js, REST and GraphQL APIs, Git-based workflows, and CI/CD pipelines
- Verification and Validation: Automated test frameworks, test-driven development (TDD), mutation and property-based testing, static and security analysis, and LLM evaluation frameworks
- Runtime and Observability: Docker and Kubernetes for sandboxed agent execution, OpenTelemetry tracing, metrics, dashboards, and PostgreSQL
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Take the First Step Towards Your Dream Career
Every Dell Technologies team member brings something unique to the table. Here is what we are looking for with this role:
Essential Requirements:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience;. Ability to thrive in an AI-native, startup-style team where ambiguity is normal and execution speed matters
- Proven track record of building core components of an autonomous agent platform in production (e.g., agent execution loops, planning and task decomposition, tool-calling/MCP layers, or memory and context management). *Building simple LLM API wrappers or using commercial coding assistants alone is not sufficient*
- Experience operating long-running autonomous agents in production: isolated sandbox environments (containers or microVMs), state checkpointing/resume, failure recovery, loop and drift detection, and token/cost budgets
- Deep expertise in context engineering for software agents on large, complex codebases: code indexing and retrieval, repository maps, and context compaction, with measurable improvements in task success rates
- Experience with evaluation-driven agent development: designing benchmarks and evaluation suites to measure task completion, iterating on agent behavior based on metrics, and enforcing automated verification
Desirable Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
- Experience deploying, extending, or integrating commercial or open-source autonomous agent platforms in an enterprise environment (including custom agents, SDK/MCP extensions, and self-hosted/private deployments)
- Production experience with multi-agent systems (planner, executor, and reviewer patterns; agent handoffs), durable execution engines, published agent benchmarks, or contributions to open-source agent frameworks
About Dell Technologies — ISG Developer Experience
Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group is a global leader in Solutions, Storage, Compute, and Networking. The Developer Experience organization within ISG is responsible for developer productivity, tooling, observability, and platform engineering for approximately 9,000 engineers. Our current mandate spans agentic SDLC transformation, AI tooling governance, and the operating model changes required to make AI-assisted development the norm — not the exception.
Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) builds the products that power infrastructure, solutions, and data management our customers need most. Our teams design and develop the hardware and software that connect infrastructure, accelerate computational workloads, integrate across the stack, protect data continuity, and deliver the platforms, applications, and diagnostics our customers rely on every day at enterprise scale.
Some product builders follow the rules. Ours rewrite them.
Within ISG, innovation isn't just about creating new technology- it's about challenging assumptions and reimagining how work gets done. Engineers define intent, author precise specifications, and orchestrate AI agents that execute at speed and scale. AI is embedded throughout our development process, helping us move faster, learn quicker, and deliver greater impact. Yet the most important contribution remains uniquely human: deciding what to build, designing how it should work, and applying the judgment needed to earn our customers' trust. When your products power critical infrastructure around the world, that responsibility matters.
We move quickly toward the work that matters most. We reward experimentation, encourage bold thinking, and remove unnecessary barriers so great ideas can become reality faster. Our teams embrace a customer-first, first-to-market mindset, transforming rapid feedback into better products and better outcomes. We aren't looking for people who are content with the status quo- we look for builders who question it, improve it, and occasionally rewrite it.
If you're energized by solving complex systems challenges, excited to work alongside AI to amplify your impact, and motivated by the opportunity to shape what's next instead of simply maintaining what's been done before, you'll find your place here.
Join us and help build the future of enterprise technology.
Compensation
Dell is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range for this position is $172,000 to $236,500
Benefits and Perks of Working at Dell Technologies
Your life. Your health. Supported by your benefits. You can explore the overall benefits experience that awaits you as a Dell Technologies team member — right now at MyWellatDell.com
### About the Company
Who We Are
We believe that each of us has the power to make an impact. That’s why we put our team members at the center of everything we do. If you’re looking for an opportunity to grow your career with some of the best minds and most advanced tech in the industry, we’re looking for you.
Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that helps individuals and organizations transform how they work, live and play. Join us to build a future that works for everyone because Progress Takes All of Us.
Dell Technologies is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. [Read the full Equal Employment Opportunity Policy](https://iawmqy.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/careers/pages/equal-employment-opportunity-policy-statement).
Visit our [*Culture Code*](https://jobs.dell.com/en/how-we-work-and-lead) page to learn more about how we work and lead.