About the Role

We're seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the senior technical authority across our Fortune 500 customer base, operating at the intersection of hands-on engineering, solution architecture, and strategic customer partnership. You'll own the most complex integration designs and AI-powered workflow implementations end-to-end: decomposing enterprise supply chain problems into architecture, building the solution, and ensuring it scales.

This is not a coordination role. You will write code, build data pipelines, design microservices architectures, and ship production integrations alongside the team. When a customer needs a real-time event-driven integration with their SAP landscape, or an agentic workflow that autonomously resolves shipment exceptions, you're the person who designs it, proves it out, and ensures it delivers business value. You'll carry strategic customer relationships across the full account lifecycle (pre-sales through production), feed field intelligence back into Product and R&D, and build external thought leadership that establishes FourKites as the technical standard in supply chain AI.

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, this is a senior individual contributor role. You'll lead without direct reports, operating through technical excellence, mentorship, and cross-functional influence across Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Product, and R&D Engineering.
What you'll be doing

Solution Architecture & Hands-On Engineering

• Architect end-to-end integration solutions for complex enterprise environments spanning ERP (SAP, Oracle, Blue Yonder, Manhattan), OMS, WMS, TMS, and YMS platforms, working directly with customer technical teams to translate business problems into implementable designs
• Design and build data pipelines (batch and streaming) using messaging infrastructure and event-driven architectures that enable real-time supply chain data flow at enterprise scale
• Build, extend, and optimize agentic AI workflows using LangGraph, LangChain, and related frameworks, integrating LLM-powered automation into customer-facing supply chain operations
• Design microservices architectures for integration layers: API gateway patterns, service decomposition, inter-service communication, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native deployment on AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Develop and maintain APIs (REST, GraphQL) and integration middleware connecting customer enterprise systems to the FourKites platform
• Own technical proof-of-concepts for new integration patterns, AI-powered workflows, and platform capabilities, taking them from prototype to production-ready

Integration Architecture & Standards

• Define reference architectures and reusable integration patterns that scale across customers, covering traditional EDI/file-based integrations (X12, EDIFACT, flat file, SFTP/AS2) through modern event-driven and AI-augmented approaches
• Establish engineering standards for data quality, observability, error handling, retry logic, and scalability across all customer integrations
• Drive technical decisions on integration approach selection: real-time streaming vs. batch ETL, synchronous vs. asynchronous patterns, push vs. pull models, grounded in customer system constraints and business requirements
• Evaluate emerging technologies and integration patterns, building team capability in AI/ML engineering, cloud-native architectures, and modern data infrastructure

Strategic Customer Partnership & Pre-Sales

• Build and maintain trusted-advisor relationships with technical and executive stakeholders at strategic accounts, spanning the full lifecycle from initial scoping through production optimization
• Provide solutions architecture consultation during pre-sales: scoping complex integration and AI agent deployments, identifying technical risks, sizing effort, and translating platform capabilities into customer business value
• Partner with R&D Teams to shape the platform roadmap based on field experience, advocating for integration-layer and AI capability improvements grounded in real customer implementation data
• Contribute to external thought leadership: reference architectures, technical blog posts, conference presentations, and customer-facing best practice documentation

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Serve as the senior escalation point for the hardest integration and AI engineering challenges, both internal and customer-facing
• Mentor customer engineers (onshore and offshore) through design reviews, code reviews, pairing sessions, and architecture walkthroughs, raising the technical bar across the team
• Lead by building: prove out new approaches hands-on before asking the team to adopt them
• Define and track integration quality and engineering productivity metrics

About the Team

The Customer Engineering team is the technical backbone of FourKites' customer implementations, enabling Fortune 500 companies to connect our AI-powered platform with their enterprise systems. Working in close partnership with Professional Services, the team architects and delivers complex integrations spanning ERP, OMS, WMS, and TMS platforms, turning data silos into unified supply chain intelligence. As FourKites evolves toward AI-first solutions with agentic capabilities, this team plays a critical role in ensuring seamless data flow, integration reliability, and technical excellence that powers autonomous decision-making and real-time orchestration.
Who you are

Required

• 12+ years in software engineering, data engineering, or solutions architecture, with significant time in customer-facing roles designing and delivering enterprise-grade systems
• Hands-on builder: you write production code, build data pipelines, debug distributed systems, and architect solutions, not just review them
• Deep expertise in data pipeline and messaging infrastructure: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS, or comparable; hands-on experience designing streaming and batch data flows at scale
• Strong API engineering skills: designing, building, and scaling REST and GraphQL APIs; experience with API gateway patterns, rate limiting, versioning, and authentication protocols
• Hands-on AI engineering experience: building agentic workflows and LLM-powered applications using LangGraph, LangChain, or equivalent frameworks; practical understanding of prompt engineering, tool orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent evaluation
• Microservices architecture expertise: service decomposition, inter-service communication (gRPC, async messaging), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native deployment on AWS, Azure, or GCP
• 3+ years of experience in logistics, supply chain, or transportation technology; working understanding of supply chain data flows (orders, shipments, inventory, tracking events, carrier integrations)
• Working knowledge of enterprise integration patterns: EDI (X12, EDIFACT), middleware platforms (MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Informatica), file-based protocols (SFTP, AS2), and data transformation/ETL
• Solutions architect mindset: you start with the customer's business problem, design the right architecture, and can present the approach to both engineers and C-suite stakeholders with equal clarity
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or equivalent experience

Preferred

• Experience with enterprise ERP/TMS/WMS platforms (SAP, Oracle, Blue Yonder, Manhattan) and their integration surfaces
• Track record of building reusable integration frameworks, accelerators, or internal developer tools adopted across multiple customer engagements
• Experience leading technical teams through platform transformations: API modernization, monolith-to-microservices migration, cloud-native adoption
• External thought leadership experience: conference talks, published technical content, open-source contributions, or community engagement
• Familiarity with supply chain visibility, control tower, or real-time tracking platforms

Travel Requirement

Up to 30% (customer sites, critical implementations, team locations)
Location

Chicago (preferred) or remote with regular Chicago travel
Compensation

The expected annual base salary range for this role is $140,000 - $170,000. Actual compensation will be determined based on several factors, including but not limited to experience, qualifications, skills, and business needs. In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for bonus and incentive compensation as well as participation in FourKites' employee stock option program.
Benefits

FourKites provides competitive compensation with stock options, outstanding benefits and a collaborative culture for all employees around the globe. To help you be your best, we have 5 global recharge days, in addition to generous PTO and standard holidays. Parental leave for all parents, an annual wellness stipend and volunteer days also provide you with time and resources for self care and to care for others. Throughout the year, FourKites sets aside time during the workday to learn and celebrate diversity. We're always listening for new ways to support everyone in and out of the office.

Benefits include:

• Medical, Dental & Vision benefits starting on first day of employment
• 401k Retirement savings with employer match
• Bonus and incentive compensation as well as employee stock option program
• Employer paid life insurance and short term disability insurance
• Generous PTO, global recharge days, and volunteer days
• Paid parental leave for all parents
• Family planning and inclusive wellbeing resources
• Technology reimbursement
• Commuter benefits for in-office employees (Chicago)
• Annual Wellness Stipend
• Ongoing learning & development opportunities