Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Washington

This is a full-time onsite role based in the location(s) posted and is performed from the designated work location five days per week. No relocation is offered.

We’re looking for a Principal AI-Native Software Engineer who can turn complex business needs into intelligent, production-ready software.

You’ll work at the intersection of software engineering, agentic AI, LLM-powered applications, and enterprise automation, partnering directly with business and technical stakeholders to move ideas rapidly from concept to production. You’ll build scalable Python services, APIs, agentic workflows, and integrations that enable intelligent automation across AT&T.

This is not simply an AI experimentation role. We’re looking for an engineer who knows how to combine emerging AI capabilities with proven software engineering practices to deliver solutions that are secure, reliable, observable, maintainable, and built for production.

What You'll Do:

• Design and build production-grade AI-enabled applications, backend services, and REST APIs using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
• Create agentic AI workflows using LangGraph or similar frameworks, including tool calling, routing, planning and execution, multi-step workflows, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Partner directly with business and technical stakeholders in a collaborative 2-in-a-box model, translating ambiguous business challenges into technical designs and working solutions.
• Integrate AI applications securely with enterprise APIs, databases, event streams, service gateways, and other internal platforms.
• Design reliable tool and service contracts for AI agents, including schemas, validation, idempotency, retries, rate limits, error handling, and access controls.
• Develop evaluation strategies for AI and agentic systems, including success criteria, regression testing, prompt/tool validation, guardrails, and release gates.
• Implement RAG, vector search, context engineering, structured outputs, and grounding techniques when appropriate to improve accuracy and usability.
• Build end-to-end solutions across backend services, databases, and front-end experiences using technologies such as Angular and other modern web frameworks.
• Apply secure-by-design practices including authentication, authorization, secrets management, least privilege, auditability, input validation, and PII-aware data handling.
• Build production observability with logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerting, and incident troubleshooting.
• Implement automated testing, CI/CD, Docker-based deployment, and resilient distributed-system patterns including retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, backpressure, and graceful degradation.
• Use AI coding assistants throughout the engineering lifecycle for code generation, refactoring, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining rigorous engineering standards.

What You'll Bring:

• A builder mindset with the ability to move quickly from an ambiguous business problem to a working technical solution.
• Strong understanding of AI-native software development, including how and where LLMs and agentic workflows provide meaningful value.
• Hands-on experience developing applications that use LLMs, structured prompting, function/tool calling, output validation, and grounding.
• Ability to build agentic solutions that go beyond simple chat interfaces and execute multi-step workflows, use tools, interact with systems, and manage state.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture, system design, API design, data modeling, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
• Experience designing software for production realities including security, scalability, resiliency, observability, maintainability, and operational support.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to both engineering and non-technical business partners.
• An AI-augmented engineering approach, using modern AI development tools to accelerate delivery without sacrificing software quality.

What You'll Need:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and delivering production applications or services.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong Python development experience, ideally with FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
• Hands-on experience designing and developing REST APIs and backend/microservice architectures.
• Experience integrating applications with enterprise platforms, databases, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and relational databases; NoSQL/document database experience is beneficial.
• Experience with unit testing, integration testing, automated testing, CI/CD, code review, and refactoring.
• Experience with Docker and deployment into cloud or enterprise environments.
• Working knowledge of production monitoring using structured logging, metrics, tracing, performance analysis, and incident troubleshooting.
• Understanding of secure API development, authentication/authorization, secrets management, least privilege, and audit logging.
• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs or Generative AI capabilities into software applications.
• Experience with tool/function calling, structured prompting, output validation, RAG, retrieval, or other grounding techniques.
• Demonstrated use of AI coding assistants as part of the software development lifecycle.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with LangGraph or comparable agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience designing multi-agent or multi-step agentic workflows.
• Experience with Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or other workflow/orchestration technologies.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures using Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pub/Sub, or comparable technologies.
• Experience implementing RAG, embeddings, semantic/vector search, and vector databases in production environments.
• Experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, API gateways, or service mesh technologies.
• Experience developing reusable SDKs, internal developer platforms, AI tool libraries, or reference architectures.
• Experience with Angular or another modern JavaScript/TypeScript front-end framework.

Our Principal Data/AI Engineering jobs earn between $155,400.00 - $261,100.00 USD Annual. Not to mention all the other amazing rewards that working at AT&T offers. Individual starting salary within this range may depend on geography, experience, expertise, and education/training.

Joining our team comes with amazing perks and benefits:

• Medical/Dental/Vision coverage
• 401(k) plan
• Tuition reimbursement program
• Paid Time Off and Holidays (based on date of hire, at least 23 days of vacation each year and 9 company-designated holidays)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid Caregiver Leave
• Additional sick leave beyond what state and local law require may be available but is unprotected
• Adoption Reimbursement
• Disability Benefits (short term and long term)
• Life and Accidental Death Insurance
• Supplemental benefit programs: critical illness/accident hospital indemnity/group legal
• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
• Extensive employee wellness programs
• Employee discounts up to 50% off on eligible AT&T mobility plans and accessories, AT&T internet (and fiber where available) and AT&T phone

Weekly Hours:

40

Time Type:

Regular

Location:

Alpharetta, Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, Bothell, Washington, Dallas, Texas, Middletown, New Jersey, Plano, Texas

Salary Range:

$155,400.00 - $261,100.00

AT&T and its subsidiaries are committed to equal employment opportunity. All hiring, promotion, and other employment decisions remain merit-based and free from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, physical disability, mental disability, pregnancy, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. In addition, AT&T will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. AT&T is a fair chance employer and does not initiate a background check until an offer is made. Click here to learn more or request an application accommodation here.