Principal AI Engineer
RemoteUnited Kingdom
Job Summary
Set the technical direction for AI at HotDocs by owning architecture for model management, LLM orchestration, retrieval strategy, and evaluation. Deliver enterprise-scale features from prototype to production using .NET Core and React while driving AI adoption across the SDLC through coding assistants, agentic workflows, and test generation. Establish evaluation harnesses, guardrails, and observability to ensure safe, explainable AI in regulated environments. Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and partner with product and security teams to shape the roadmap. Extend CI/CD pipelines to cover AI workloads including prompt versioning and automated evaluation gates. This remote-first role requires 12+ years of experience and focuses on building trustworthy AI for Fortune 100 legal and compliance clients.
Required Qualifications
- 12 or more years of professional software development experience
- time in a principal, lead, or staff-level technical role
- Strong skills in .NET Core (C#) and React (TypeScript) or similar SPA frameworks
- Demonstrable experience designing and shipping production AI solutions
- LLM integration
- prompt engineering
- RAG
- MCP
- agentic or tool-calling systems
- Hands-on experience with cloud AI platforms and services
- Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry
- equivalent cloud AI platforms
- orchestration frameworks such as Semantic Kernel
- Experience building and maintaining REST APIs
- Proficiency with Entity Framework
- Azure SQL
- SQL Server
- Experience evaluating and improving AI system quality
- test sets
- benchmarking
- human review loops
- handling non-deterministic behavior
- Understanding of web applications and AI-specific security
- secure coding
- prompt injection
- safe handling of sensitive customer data
- Experience using Git
- collaborating through modern workflows
- pull requests
- branching strategies
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines
- Azure DevOps
- similar CI/CD tools
- Comfortable working in agile teams
- tools such as Jira
- Confluence
- Practical experience using AI tooling within the SDLC
- coding assistants
- agentic developer tools
- a view on how to adopt it well across a team
- A track record of technical leadership
- mentoring senior engineers
- leading design reviews
- influencing roadmap and architecture decisions
Desired Qualifications
- Deeper AI specialism in areas such as SLMs and fine-tuning
- CAG
- vector databases
- AI observability
- multi-agent systems
- AI/ML pipelines
- Experience with Microsoft Office Addins
- office.js
- VSTO
- Familiarity of .NET Framework
- WPF
- Experience with authentication standards such as OAuth and SSO
- Exposure to distributed caching
- Redis
- Knowledge of Linux environments and containerization
- Docker
- Scripting in PowerShell
- Familiarity with performance tuning and application diagnostics
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code or automation tooling
- Previous experience in enterprise SaaS or compliance-heavy domains
- legaltech
- fintech
- applying AI to document, contract, or natural language workloads
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