Senior Principal Software Engineer

Shutterfly is a company that focuses on helping customers create products and capture moments that reflect their unique selves. They are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and development of next-generation Agentic AI platforms and applications to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction. The role involves technical leadership in building scalable AI systems, driving technical strategy, and ensuring measurable business impact.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and build scalable agentic AI systems that power various seamless experiences for customers that drive conversion and customer delight
• Develop multi-agent systems that reason, plan, and take actions across tools and services
• Build Autonomous agents operating across end-to-end customer journeys
• Build reusable platforms, not one-off solutions
• Enable multiple teams to innovate independently
• Define platform abstractions and reusable capabilities that enable teams across the organization to build and deploy AI-powered experiences independently
• Contribute to, define and lead architecture for AI platforms integrated into Shutterfly
• Build foundational capabilities including:
• Evaluation frameworks for AI quality, safety, and business impact
• Scalable inference and orchestration infrastructure
• Ensure systems are highly available, performant, and production-grade at scale
• Maintain deep hands-on involvement in prototyping, architecture, and critical production systems, setting the standard for engineering excellence
• Leverage modern AI tooling (LLMs, agents, vector databases, orchestration frameworks)
• Set the standard for AI-driven engineering productivity and development practices
• Lead by example in coding, design reviews, and system debugging
• Define and track AI-specific success metrics, including model quality, latency, cost efficiency, and business KPIs
• Partner with Product, UX, and Data teams to translate AI capabilities into:
• Increased conversion and revenue
• Improved customer experience and engagement
• Faster time-to-market for new capabilities
• Drive experimentation (A/B testing) and ensure AI systems deliver quantifiable outcomes
• Influence architecture and execution across multiple teams and domains:
• Ecommerce platform (shopping, cart, checkout)
• Creation flows and personalization systems
• Marketing technology and lifecycle platforms
• Mentor senior engineers and leaders; raise the bar on AI and system design excellence
• Champion adoption of agentic AI and AI-first development practices across engineering

Requirements:

• Bachelors degree in an Engineering discipline or Computer Science
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems
• Proven track record of architecting and delivering large-scale, high-impact systems
• Experience influencing and leading cross-organizational technical strategy
• Strong hands-on coding and system design skills
• Experience operating large-scale, highly available cloud systems
• Demonstrated ability to translate advanced technology into business impact
• Masters degree in an Engineering discipline or Computer Science
• Experience building 0→1 AI platforms or products in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Experience building AI/ML systems, especially with: LLMs, agent frameworks, and retrieval systems
• Multi-agent architectures and orchestration
• Experience in consumer-facing products or ecommerce platforms