Bank of America Corporation

Principal Engineer - Context Engineering & LLM Optimization

Bank of America Corporation$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or AI engineering experience.
  • 5+ years designing large-scale enterprise systems.
  • 2+ years working with LLM, RAG, vector search, or AI platform capabilities.
  • Extensive experience building or architecting production LLM or AI assistant systems.
  • Strong knowledge of context window management, token budgeting, and prompt construction.

Responsibilities

  • Develops the engineering approach for enterprise software delivery capabilities.
  • Leads planning, design, and definition of complex features across multiple teams.
  • Creates innovative ideas for technology and solution development.
  • Defines the tool stack for solutions based on internal standards.
  • Explores cutting-edge technologies to enhance development efficiency and quality.
  • Designs retrieval orchestration and optimization strategies for LLMs.
  • Implements evaluation frameworks for LLM answer quality and relevance.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction.
  • Position as a senior technical authority for enterprise AI platform engineering.
  • Chance to advance technology platforms through innovative solutions.
  • Collaboration across diverse teams and domains.
  • Participation in defining reusable patterns and architectural standards.
Full Job Description
Job Description:

This job is responsible for defining and leading the engineering approach for solutions at the program or portfolio level, to deliver significant business outcomes. Key responsibilities include continuously improving the design, quality, and reuse of the solution and delivering technology enablers that improve development efficiencies for the solution. Job expectations include familiarity with at least one area of engineering, acting as a "go to" reference across the organization, and applying knowledge to improve technical competencies through recruitment and development activities.

Developer Experience (DevEx) provides enterprise technical standards and common technical services, platforms, and tools that are leveraged by delivery teams across all lines of business. Within the SDLC Software Delivery Lifecycle program, this role leads portfolio product delivery strategy and execution for enterprise software delivery capabilities, ensuring the right investments, operating model, governance, and prioritization are in place to improve how internal technical users build, test, and deliver software at scale.

The Context Engineering & LLM Optimization Principal Engineer is responsible for designing how information is selected, organized, compressed, prioritized, and presented to LLMs. This role focuses on context window management, prompt architecture, retrieval orchestration, grounding strategies, instruction design, tool-use patterns, and evaluation of LLM behavior.

This engineer ensures that LLM applications receive the right context, in the right format, at the right time, with minimal token waste and maximum answer quality.

Responsibilities:

  • Develops the engineering approach for the entire program/portfolio solution and works with Architecture, to develop/analyze/deliver the implementation of technical enablers
  • Leads the planning, definition, and design of the complex features which span multiple teams and explore solution alternatives
  • Creates ideas on designing complex technology and solution development approaches
  • Leads the technical oversight for teams in solution development including design reviews and code within own domain
  • Defines the technology tool stack for the solution within ranged of internally approved and supported technologies
  • Explores state-of-the-art technologies to improve development efficiencies, quality of test/QA coverage, and release management
  • Leads and is responsible for the end-to-end test strategy/creation/adherence, and the integration between teams for a program/portfolio solution
  • Design context engineering strategies for enterprise LLM and RAG applications.
  • Define prompt architectures for system prompts, developer instructions, user prompts, retrieved context, tool outputs, conversation history, and structured constraints.
  • Optimize context window usage through summarization, compression, ranking, filtering, deduplication, and context prioritization.
  • Design retrieval orchestration patterns that determine what data is retrieved, when it is retrieved, and how it is injected into the LLM prompt.
  • Partner with RAG database engineers to tune retrieval outputs for downstream reasoning quality.
  • Partner with data ingestion engineers to improve source formatting, metadata, and chunk structures for better contextual use.
  • Develop patterns for multi-turn conversation memory, session state, user intent preservation, and context refresh.
  • Define strategies for grounding, citation handling, source attribution, conflicting evidence resolution, and hallucination reduction.
  • Improve the experience for our developers, making it easier to deliver industry-leading solutions, while managing work efficiently and with the right controls
  • Advance our technology platforms through innovation
  • Reduce risk and improve quality across our technology portfolio by aligning to a single enterprise architecture strategy and delivering governance that enables consistency, integration and automation
  • Design LLM evaluation frameworks for answer quality, factuality, instruction adherence, relevance, safety, and token efficiency.
  • Establish prompt engineering and context engineering standards across product and platform teams.
  • Evaluate LLM model behavior across different context sizes, retrieval strategies, and prompt structures.
  • Define reusable patterns for agents, tool calling, function calling, dynamic prompt generation, and workflow-based reasoning.
  • Lead technical reviews for LLM application design, prompt safety, and context efficiency.
  • Serve as a senior technical authority for enterprise AI platform engineering.
  • Own architecture decisions that impact multiple teams, systems, or domains.
  • Create reusable patterns, reference architectures, standards, and engineering guardrails.
  • Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction without requiring direct reporting authority.
  • Balance innovation with operational reliability, security, compliance, scalability, and cost management.
  • Communicate complex AI and data engineering concepts clearly to engineering, product, risk, security, and executive stakeholders.


Required Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or AI engineering experience.
  • 5+ years designing large-scale enterprise systems.
  • 2+ years working with LLM, RAG, vector search, semantic search, or AI platform capabilities.
  • Experience operating systems in regulated, security-conscious, or enterprise-scale environments.
  • Extensive experience building or architecting production LLM, RAG, or AI assistant systems.
  • Deep understanding of how LLMs use prompts, retrieved context, conversation history, system instructions, and tool outputs.
  • Strong knowledge of context window management, token budgeting, prompt construction, grounding, and response evaluation.
  • Experience with OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta Llama, or similar LLM ecosystems.
  • Experience designing prompt templates, retrieval-augmented prompts, agent workflows, and tool-use orchestration.
  • Familiarity with vector search, embeddings, reranking, semantic retrieval, and document chunking.
  • Experience with automated LLM evaluation, prompt regression testing, and quality measurement.
  • Ability to define enterprise standards for reliable, explainable, and secure LLM behavior.
  • Proven ability to lead architecture across multiple engineering teams.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field


Desired Qualifications:

  • Experience with agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, function calling, or tool-augmented reasoning.
  • Experience with prompt injection mitigation, jailbreak resistance, and secure context handling.
  • Experience with token optimization, long-context models, summarization pipelines, and contextual compression.
  • Experience with user personalization, enterprise memory patterns, or domain-specific copilots.
  • Higher-quality LLM responses with better grounding and reduced hallucination.
  • Lower token usage and improved response latency through efficient context construction.
  • Standardized prompt and context patterns reused across teams.
  • Improved evaluation coverage for LLM behavior, factuality, and instruction adherence.
  • Better alignment between retrieved enterprise knowledge and generated responses.
  • Enterprise architecture
  • Distributed systems design
  • AI platform engineering
  • Data governance and security
  • Cloud-native engineering
  • Observability and operational excellence
  • Technical strategy and roadmap development
  • Cross-functional influence
  • Vendor and platform evaluation
  • Production support and continuous improvement


Skills:
  • Automation
  • Influence
  • Result Orientation
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Technical Strategy Development
  • Application Development
  • Architecture
  • Business Acumen
  • Risk Management
  • Solution Design
  • Agile Practices
  • Analytical Thinking
  • Collaboration
  • Data Management
  • Solution Delivery Process


Shift:
1st shift (United States of America)

Hours Per Week:
40

About Bank of America Corporation

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is the corporate and investment banking division of Bank of America. It provides services in mergers and acquisitions, equity and debt capital markets, lending, trading, risk management, research, and liquidity and payments management. It was formed through the combination of the corporate and investment banking activities of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch following the acquisition of the latter by the former in January 2009. Bank of America completed the acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co on 1 January 2009. Bank of America began rebranding all of its corporate and investment banking activities under the Bank of America Merrill Lynch name in September 2009. In April 2010, Bank of America Merrill Lynch appointed Christian Meissner as head of investment banking for Europe, Middle East and Africa. In April 2011, Bank of America Merrill Lynch integrated its corporate and investment banking operations into a single division. In October 2013, Bank of America Merrill Lynch was recognised as the Most Innovative Investment Bank of the Year in The Banker's Investment Banking Awards.

Bank of America Corporation Careers

Join the dynamic team at Bank of America Corporation, a premier global financial institution where innovation, leadership, and growth go hand in hand. As one of the largest banks in the world, we offer unparalleled job opportunities and a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and professional growth. Work You’ll Do At Bank of America Corporation, you’ll be part of a team that’s dedicated to making a real difference. Whether you’re helping families buy their first home, advising businesses on expansion, or developing cutting-edge financial technologies, your work will have an impact. Our commitment to leadership in the financial industry has never been stronger, and we need passionate, skilled professionals to lead our journey. Explore a World of Opportunities From entry-level positions to leadership roles, Bank of America Corporation offers a variety of career paths in areas such as investment banking, technology, marketing, and risk management. Our job opportunities span the globe, providing the chance to work alongside the best in the industry and develop skills that will propel your career forward. Internship Programs Kickstart your career with Bank of America Corporation’s internship programs. These opportunities provide hands-on experience and a chance to engage in meaningful work that complements your academic studies. Interns gain invaluable networking opportunities, receive mentorship from seasoned professionals, and learn about the culture and operations of a global financial leader. Benefits and Growth Bank of America Corporation is committed to the well-being and continuous professional development of our team members. We offer a competitive benefits package that supports the health, financial stability, and work-life balance of our employees. Our training programs and development initiatives ensure that every team member has the opportunity to grow and advance within the company. Inclusive Culture We believe our strength lies in our diversity. Bank of America Corporation fosters an inclusive environment where all employees can thrive. Through diversity training and a commitment to equal opportunities, we cultivate leadership and innovation that reflect the wide-ranging communities we serve. Join Our Team Are you ready to advance your career at a company that’s at the forefront of the financial industry? Explore the positions available at Bank of America Corporation and find where your skills and interests align with our needs. We are continuously hiring and looking for individuals who are curious, creative, and eager to drive change. Stay Connected Keep up to date with the latest from Bank of America Corporation Careers by subscribing to our job alert emails. Tailor your subscription to receive updates that match your career interests and get insider tips that can help you during your application and interview process. Bank of America Corporation is not just a company—it’s a place where you can shape your future and the future of finance. Join us and be part of a team that’s redefining what a bank can be.
Learn more about Bank of America Corporation
Size
208,000 employees
Market Cap
$260.3 billion
Industry
Net Income
$17.8 billion
Founded
1998
5 Year Trend
-1.4%
NASDAQ

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