Principal AI Software Engineer

Walker & Dunlop is hiring a Principal AI Software Engineer to shape its Loan Origination and Servicing platform and the AI systems used across the business. The role designs and delivers scalable AI applications, agentic workflows, and reusable platform capabilities, while supporting reliable deployment and operation of software.

Responsibilities:

• Own complex AI and platform initiatives end-to-end, delivering business-facing capabilities while strengthening the underlying context and agent platform
• Design, build and maintain agentic workflows for business-critical processes such as loan intake, document review and servicing
• Help establish new platform patterns and capabilities by defining approaches, proving them through production use cases and scaling them for broader adoption
• Lead model selection and routing, evaluating models based on cost, latency and quality, and evolving solutions as new models and capabilities become available
• Design interfaces and capabilities used by other teams, including MCP tool servers, agent handoffs, subagents, long-running state and human-in-the-loop checkpoints
• Establish evaluation and reliability practices, including evaluation sets, LLM-as-judge approaches where appropriate, regression testing and ongoing performance measurement
• Operate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying risks, making sound technical trade-offs and escalating when needed, while raising the engineering bar through collaboration and mentorship
• Perform other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software development experience, including experience as a senior individual contributor delivering production systems
• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Extensive experience delivering production AI/ML systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
• Deep experience with modern agent frameworks and SDKs, such as Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph and Pydantic AI, as well as MCP and A2A
• Experience with prompt and context engineering, including RAG, embeddings, hybrid search and reranking
• Experience with model evaluation, observability and guardrails for production AI systems
• Experience using agentic development tools, including skills, subagents and harness configurations
• Deep proficiency in Python and modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI, with a strong focus on scalable and maintainable architecture
• Strong expertise with SQL databases, including schema design, query optimization and performance tuning
• Experience testing non-deterministic systems, including LLM call fixtures, evaluation suites and strategies for controlling flaky behavior
• Strong judgment in determining which capabilities belong within a shared platform versus individual applications
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, establish emerging patterns and independently move from business problem definition through solution delivery
• Experience with Event Sourcing and Domain-Driven Design principles
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to show ownership of your work, take on challenges and acknowledge growth opportunities, and demonstrate patience when learning new processes
• Experience in Real Estate, Financial Services or Capital Markets preferred