Principal Software Engineer

AlphaSense is a company that provides AI-driven market intelligence solutions to help organizations make informed decisions. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the design and evolution of their financial data extraction platform, focusing on reducing human dependency through improved system reliability and trust.

Responsibilities:

• Own the architecture and evolution of our large-scale data extraction and normalization platform
• Design systems that process hundreds of thousands of records across heterogeneous sources (PDF, HTML, APIs, XLS) with high reliability
• Define and implement strategies to minimize human-in-the-loop validation through AI-based validation, confidence scoring, provenance tracking, and deterministic safeguards
• Establish clear system contracts for correctness, traceability, and confidence (e.g., “where did this number come from?”)
• Balance AI-driven approaches with procedural and rules-based systems where they improve reliability and explainabilityIdentify and remediate architectural and operational bottlenecks impacting scale, accuracy, and developer velocity
• Act as the technical authority to block poor designs, redesign critical systems, and introduce new platforms or tooling when necessary
• Partner with product and downstream consumers to define quality bars, SLAs, and success metrics
• Serve as a technical escalation point for production issues, reliability failures, and systemic risks
• Mentor senior engineers, shape technical culture, and raise expectations for system design and execution
• Contribute to long-term technical strategy while remaining hands-on with critical implementations

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience building and operating large-scale production systems
• Proven experience designing data ingestion, extraction, or processing systems at scale
• Deep expertise in one or more of: Distributed systems, Data platforms and pipelines, AI/ML-powered extraction or classification systems, Platform or infrastructure engineering
• Demonstrated ability to design trustworthy systems that combine probabilistic (AI) and deterministic approaches
• Strong understanding of system reliability, observability, failure modes, and iterative hardening
• Experience reducing operational or human overhead through better system design
• Track record of technical leadership across teams without formal people management
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving clarity where none exists
• Passion for using AI responsibly and effectively to deliver scalable, high-confidence systems
• Experience with document understanding, NLP, or financial data extraction
• Experience building provenance, lineage, or confidence-scoring systems
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and modern data stacks
• Experience shaping or owning internal platforms used by multiple teams