Principal AI Engineer

Job description

**Are you ready to shape the future of data?** Matillion is the company behind [Maia](https://www.maia.ai/), the AI Data Automation platform. In the AI economy, demand for data is exploding. Manual data engineering can’t keep up. Maia fixes that by combining 15 years of data expertise with agentic AI to eliminate the manual work that slows data teams down. Organisations like Cisco, DocuSign, and Slack are already using it to deliver real business impact, faster. We started in Manchester and now we’re global - with teams across the UK, US and India. We are driven, curious, energetic people who move fast, think big and hold ourselves to a high standard. We’re here to make a dent in the universe bigger than ourselves. And we’re looking for people who want to be part of it. About the role As a Principal Engineer on our Maia AI team, you'll be at the heart of everything we do: designing agentic AI systems, leveraging evals to continually validate their performance as model capabilities evolve, building new tools and integrations, and staying finger-on-the-pulse with the latest developments in Gen AI. This isn't BAU engineering – this is high-visibility, high-impact work where your decisions shape the product. You'll be driving architecture, mentoring engineers, and feeding into strategy. Things move quickly here. Requirements evolve, new opportunities emerge, and we need someone who thrives in that environment. If you have been working on Agentic AI projects and taking them into production environments – and you want to do that at scale in a world-class engineering team – this is the role for you. ### What you will be doing - Lead technical architecture and design for the Maia team - working within a squad to define direction, validate proposals, and ensure we're building scalable, maintainable software at pace - Drive agentic AI feature development - building new tools, integrations, and workflows that push the boundaries of what Maia can do - Stay ahead of the curve on Gen AI developments - trialling new models, tools, and approaches, feeding insights into team strategy and championing new ways of working - Act as technical mentor and coach to engineers across the team - raising the bar through code reviews, design input, and hands-on guidance - Collaborate closely with our Product Manager and Data Science team to translate product vision into technical reality, balancing innovation with code quality and delivery pace ### What we are looking for - Proven experience working on agentic AI systems - you understand how they differ from traditional systems, you've built and led features in this space, and you have a point of view on how to test and scale them - Deep programming background, ideally with Java, combined with hands-on experience building scalable distributed systems on AWS - you write great code and think seriously about architecture - Technical leadership experience - you've been a tech lead, influenced architecture decisions, and helped other engineers grow; you can communicate complex concepts to non-technical stakeholders without breaking a sweat - Full stack capability is a strong plus - particularly React, TypeScript, and Tailwind - and familiarity with frameworks like Langchain or Langgraph would be welcome - Adaptable and fast-moving - you thrive in an environment where requirements evolve, you're comfortable with ambiguity, and you have a genuine bias for action when it comes to adopting and championing new technologies