Principal Software Engineer

Vestmark is building the AI-native future of wealth management technology. We are looking for a Principal Engineer who thinks in systems cares about business outcomes and has the technical depth to define how AI-native software gets built at scale. If you have a clear point of view on where software engineering is going and want to do the work that proves it this role is for you.

We set goals as outcomes. The approach is yours to determine. Your decisions will compound over time measured in workflows eliminated costs structurally reduced and capabilities that make every subsequent project faster and cheaper to deliver.

Vestmark is a leading provider of wealth management solutions and services that enable financial advisors and institutions to efficiently manage and trade their clients' portfolios using an innovative SaaS ecosystem. With over $1.5 trillion in assets and 3.5+ million accounts we are a trusted partner to some of the largest and most respected players across the wealth management industry.

What You'll Do

Design & Build Agentic Systems

• Architect and deliver agentic systems that implement sense → think → act loops: systems that plan execute evaluate and iterate toward outcomes

• Drive the engineering organization beyond prompt-response patterns to multi-stepautonomous workflows that solve real business problems at scale

• Engineer AI-driven workflows where AI takes action produces measurable output and improves through iteration and feedback

Set Standards for AI-Native Development

• Define how engineers use AI-assisted development tools including code generation prompt engineering workflow orchestration and agentic frameworks as a team-wide engineering discipline rather than individual productivity shortcuts

• Establish and evolve standards for AI-native systems: how they handle nondeterminism manage state across multi-step processes maintain observability and control inference cost and latency

• Define testing and validation approaches for adaptive systems where behavior is not fully deterministic; hold the quality bar for production AI systems across reliability latency and correctness

• Serve as the engineering organization's authority on AI-native development practices and drive their adoption across teams

Build Reusable Foundations

• Design and deliver frameworks integration patterns and technical capabilities that reduce the cost of building every subsequent solution; the next project should be faster and cheaper because of what you built today

• Apply the principle "fix the process don't automate the broken one" as a design mandate: identify root causes and address them not symptoms

• Remain a hands-on practitioner: write clean testable maintainable code and hold the team to that standard through rigorous code review

Lead & Grow the Organization

• Collaborate across engineering product and operations to share what's working surface what isn't and help AI-native practices take hold organically

• Contribute to how Vestmark thinks about building AI-native software through design reviews architecture discussions and hands-on collaboration that raises the whole team's game

• Share what you know freely whether that's pairing on a hard problem reviewing a design or helping a teammate get more out of their AI tooling

• Contribute to the growth and development of our core values: We Before Me Positive Energy Knowledge Explorer and Own It

What We're Looking For

Core Engineering Excellence

• Demonstrated expertise building and delivering complex production-grade software systems: platforms and frameworks that other teams depend on at scale

• Strong fundamentals across the full engineering lifecycle: architecture design development testing deployment and operations

• Comfort designing systems where behavior is non-deterministic and may evolve over time as a core competency

• Experience with AWS or equivalent cloud-native environments CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment patterns

Agentic Engineering & AI Expertise

• Proven hands-on experience building agentic systems: multi-step autonomous workflows where AI plans reasons acts and iterates in production environments

• Deep practical knowledge of LLM integration: context management tool use orchestration and state management across multi-step processes

• AI-assisted development tools are a consistent intentional part of your daily engineering practice

• A clear defensible point of view on how AI is reshaping software engineering and where it is heading backed by a track record of delivery

• Understanding of how AI systems interact with data services external tools and real-world operational constraints

• Awareness of the trade-offs unique to AI-native systems including cost of inference latency observability and reliability and the judgment to navigate them in production

• Experience designing feedback loops where systems improve through usage data and iteration

Independence & Technical Leadership

• Track record of setting technical direction that others have adopted: patterns methodologies or architectural decisions that outlasted individual projects and spread across teams

• Ability to engage with ambiguous real-world business problems: understand the process identify the waste and determine the right solution before writing a line of code

• You have built deep expertise through independent study experimentation and delivery. Formal training programs in agentic AI engineering are still nascent; you have not waited for them.

What Will Help You Stand Out

• Hands-on experience delivering at least one production agentic system where AI orchestrates multi-step workflows with real autonomy and demonstrable business impact and the engineering depth to build more

• Experience building platform or framework-level tooling consumed by other engineering teams at scale

• Background in financial services technology particularly wealth management operations portfolio management or trading systems

• Demonstrated work at the intersection of technical depth and business outcomes: you measure your systems by what they replaced eliminated or made possible

Why Vestmark

• Build agentic AI systems in production in a domain where the business consequences of this work are direct and measurable: $1.5 trillion in assets millions of accounts and a business model that is actively transforming

• Define what AI-native engineering means in practice at a company that has committed to this transformation with dedicated funding and executive sponsorship

• Operate with genuine Principal-level autonomy; you will define the patterns and standards

Education & Experience

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• Typically 12+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; 8+ years with a Master's degree; or equivalent demonstrated expertise
• A sustained track record at the Principal or equivalent senior IC level with evidence of technical direction that extended beyond individual projects and influenced how others build

Vestmark is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Vestmark prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race color religion gender identity sex sexual orientation pregnancy national origin age disability status protected military or veteran status and genetic information  #LI-TG1 #LI-Hybrid

What We Do

Headquartered outside of Boston Mass. and founded in 2001 Vestmark is a leading provider of portfolio management/trading solutions and outsourced services for financial institutions and their advisors enabling them to efficiently manage and trade customized client portfolios through an innovative SaaS platform. Supporting over $1.5 trillion in assets and more than 5 million accounts Vestmark is a partner to some of the largest and most respected wealth management firms.

Why Work With Us

Our employees are the reason we've been named a Best Places to Work for several years! Our thriving hybrid work culture promotes individual growth team collaboration and employee wellness. This environment keeps client satisfaction high and employee turn-over low.

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