Epic Games

Principal Engineer, AI Platform

Epic Games$130K — $180K *
Cary, NC 27513In-Person
Enterprise Technology
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years at staff or principal scope.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
  • Production experience with authentication and authorization infrastructure techniques.
  • Strong fundamentals in security engineering and credential management.
  • Fluency in at least one compiled language, preferably Go, with experience in microservices.

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end technical architecture of Epic's AI infrastructure platforms.
  • Drive architectural decisions for agent identity and workload authorization systems.
  • Design and implement the Cluster API for orchestrating agent runs across multiple compute backends.
  • Lead the evolution of Epic's AI MCP Gateway plugin runtime and its security posture.
  • Define requirements for durability and consistency across shared event-driven architectures.

Benefits

  • 100% coverage of medical premiums for employees and dependents.
  • Robust mental well-being program offering free therapy and coaching.
  • Unlimited PTO and sick time policies.
  • Company-wide paid breaks and events throughout the year.
  • Paid sabbatical for employees after 7 years of employment.
Full Job Description
ONLINE INFRASTRUCTURE
What We Do

We enable Epic's online services teams to build, deploy, and manage services that are used by more than half a billion players around the world. Our mission is to provide world class tools and platforms to improve the experience of our developers and make it easier, faster, and safer to build, operate, and scale their applications. We operate at massive scale as one of the largest cloud computing users in the world.
What You'll Do

Epic Games is the creator of Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Epic Games Store - a company that has shaped the way billions of people play, create, and connect. We build the foundational technology that powers some of the largest interactive experiences on the planet, and we give those tools to creators and developers around the world through open ecosystems.

Behind the products is an engineering organization that operates at rare scale: real-time infrastructure for hundreds of millions of players, a game engine used across film, architecture, and automotive industries, and a platform ecosystem that lets indie developers ship games to every major device on Earth.

Our AI Platform team is building the next layer of that infrastructure - an enterprise-grade stack of agentic AI systems that automates engineering workflows, accelerates developer productivity, and enables new kinds of collaboration across Epic's teams. We're not a research group and we're not deploying off-the-shelf tools. We're architecting and building production systems from the ground up, across six interconnected platforms:
  • AI Agent Orchestration - multi-tenant platform for team AI agents that live and collaborate in Slack channels, Source Control, etc.
  • EMA (Epic Managed Agents) - compute and workspace infrastructure for headless agent harness runs at scale
  • AI MCP Gateway - MCP OAuth gateway, plugin runtime, and governance layer for AI tool orchestration
  • Non Human Identity Management - agent identity, credential vault, and authorization for non-human workloads
  • Centralized AI Knowledge Base - org-wide memory plane with knowledge graph, deductive reasoning, and hierarchical summarization
  • Roost - cryptographically signed software distribution and the Claude Code plugin marketplace

This is foundational work that will define how AI is used inside Epic for the next decade. The scale is real, the problems are hard, and the team is small enough that every engineer makes a decisive architectural impact.

As a Principal Engineer on the AI Platform team, you'll own the technical direction of our agent infrastructure stack end to end. You'll set the architecture across the six platforms above, drive alignment between them, and personally solve the hardest distributed systems and security problems that emerge as the stack scales. You'll work across teams to ensure agent identity, tool governance, memory, and execution infrastructure are coherent, secure, and operable - and you'll mentor the engineers who build alongside you. This isn't a coordinator role. You'll write production code, design protocols, make the calls that determine how agents authenticate and what they're allowed to do, and be accountable for the reliability of systems that are actively used by Epic's engineering organization.
In this role, you will
  • Platform Architecture & Technical Leadership:
    • Own the end-to-end technical architecture across Epic's AI Infrastructure Platforms - ensuring each platform is coherent with the others and that the integration seams are well-defined
    • Drive architectural decisions for agent identity and workload authorization (SPIFFE/SPIRE, OIDC, token exchange, policy planes), translating security requirements into implementable designs
    • Establish the patterns for how AI agents authenticate, receive credentials, execute tools, and are audited - and hold the bar for correctness across the stack
    • Lead design reviews for new capabilities, evaluate build vs. buy decisions, and surface technical risk before it becomes production risk
  • Distributed Systems & Infrastructure:
    • Design and implement the Cluster API and provider abstractions for EMA - the layer that orchestrators depend on to launch, drive, and recover headless agent runs across Kubernetes, EC2, and other compute backends
    • Evolve Epic's AI MCP Gateway plugin runtime (WASM, gRPC sidecar, subprocess multiplexer) and its gateway security posture as external tool surface area grows
    • Architect Epic's knowledge graph, vector search, and memory consolidation pipeline for org-wide scale - across teams, scopes, and retention horizons
    • Define durability, consistency, and isolation requirements across event-driven architectures (NATS JetStream, Redis) shared by multiple agent platforms
  • Security & Trust:
    • Lead the AI NHI Identity proposal from strategy into staffed execution - defining the separation of AI MCP Gateway (human/tool) and (agent identity) and migrating the existing credential vault
    • Hold the standard for credential security across the stack: AES-256-GCM vault, AAD binding, scope isolation, default-deny policy, and audit completeness
    • Work with Epic's security organization to ensure agent-to-service trust models meet enterprise standards
  • Cross-Team Influence & Mentorship:
    • Partner with product, ML, and enterprise platform teams to shape how agent capabilities are exposed to Epic's broader engineering organization
    • Mentor senior and staff engineers across the team; conduct technical interviews and raise the hiring bar
    • Write design documents that become the reference architecture for future work, not just approvals for current work
What we're looking for
  • 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years at staff or principal scope
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems: event-driven architectures, durable execution, service mesh, and multi-tenant platform design
  • Production experience with authentication and authorization infrastructure - OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SPIFFE/SPIRE or equivalent workload identity, token exchange (RFC 8693), and policy engines (OPA, OpenFGA, or comparable)
  • Strong security engineering fundamentals: credential vaulting, secrets management (OpenBao/Vault), audit trail design, and least-privilege access at scale
  • Fluency in at least one compiled, systems-capable language (Go preferred, Rust or C++ acceptable); comfort reading and writing Go microservices is essential given the stack
  • Track record of owning multi-service platform architecture across a full product lifecycle - from design through sustained production operation
  • Exceptional written communication: design documents and architecture reviews that are clear, precise, and influence without authority
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-integrated systems: agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, MCP (Model Context Protocol), or equivalent agent-to-tool middleware
  • Experience with plugin or extension runtime design - WASM sandboxing, gRPC sidecar patterns, subprocess isolation, or comparable capability security models
  • Familiarity with knowledge graph systems (Neo4j or comparable), vector databases, and hybrid retrieval (semantic + keyword + graph), as well as experience operating Kubernetes-based platforms: scheduling, workload identity, sidecar injection, and multi-tenancy isolation
EPIC JOB + EPIC BENEFITS = EPIC LIFE

Our intent is to cover all things that are medically necessary and improve the quality of life. We pay 100% of the premiums for both you and your dependents. Our coverage includes Medical, Dental, a Vision HRA, Long Term Disability, Life Insurance & a 401k with competitive match. We also offer a robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, which provides free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents. Throughout the year we celebrate our employees with events and company-wide paid breaks. We offer unlimited PTO and sick time and recognize individuals for 7 years of employment with a paid sabbatical.

About Epic Games

Epic Games is a video game development company that is best known for creating the popular game Fortnite. The company was founded in 1991 by Tim Sweeney and is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. Epic Games has developed a number of other successful games, including the Unreal series and Gears of War. The company is also known for its Unreal Engine, a game engine that is used by many other game developers. Epic Games is committed to advancing the state of the art in game development and creating innovative and engaging experiences for players.
Learn more about Epic Games
Size
2,700 employees
Industry
Founded
1991

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