Application close date:
Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the requisition is closed.
1. Role SummaryWe are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Blue Origin finds, reasons over, and acts on its enterprise knowledge. As a senior individual contributor, you'll own the architecture of our agentic AI platform - the lakehouse, knowledge graph, retrieval systems, and natural-language interfaces that help engineering, manufacturing, and mission teams find critical data in seconds, not days.
You'll lead through technical credibility, not reporting authority - staying hands-on, writing production code, and proving out the hard parts yourself. Your impact is enterprise-wide. Your work reaches engineers designing engines, technicians building vehicles, quality teams investigating anomalies, and mission teams in flight, and is increasingly reused by other products through shared APIs and MCPs.
2. Responsibilities - Own the architecture and roadmap for Blue Origin's agentic AI, retrieval, and semantic reasoning platform.
- Stay hands-on across the full stack - write production code, build reference implementations, and prove out the hard parts yourself rather than delegating and reviewing.
- Design shared capabilities for reuse - exposed through documented APIs and MCPs - so other teams and products adopt them instead of rebuilding data and AI foundations.
- Set architecture direction across the platform portfolio (ingestion, knowledge graph, enterprise search, natural-language-to-SQL, multi-modal evidence), establishing reusable patterns and CI/CD, IaC, and release standards.
- Mentor senior / mid-level engineers and steward the standards, ADRs, and reference implementations that raise the whole team's bar.
- Establish AI evaluation and observability as engineering disciplines: regression suites, accuracy thresholds, and release gates, plus tracing and metrics (latency, cost, hallucination rate, relevance) on every production surface.
- Make AI output defensible - set the standard that answers trace to source-grounded evidence with provenance, access control, and confidence, and drive retrieval and generation quality through offline and online evaluation.
3. Must-Haves - 10+ years building production software, with 7+ years of cross-team architecture ownership or technical leadership.
- Delivered production LLM, RAG, or agentic AI systems end to end - ingestion, retrieval, reranking, prompt and context design, serving.
- Built and operated an enterprise data platform - a lakehouse or distributed architecture (Spark, Delta Lake, or equivalent), with a metadata-driven ingestion framework - including schema evolution, pipeline reliability, and workload cost.
- Full-stack depth: production Python, REST/GraphQL API design, and AWS with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CDK) and mature CI/CD.
- Passion for Blue Origin's mission and ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
4. Preferred - Lakehouse platforms (Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog)
- Knowledge graphs (Neo4j, Neptune)
- Enterprise search (Sinequa, OpenSearch)
- AI observability, inference cost and latency optimization
- Multi-modal AI over documents, imagery, or telemetry
- Graduate degree or published open-source work in applied AI
Base Pay Range for:
WA applicants is $230,773.00 - $323,081.85
Other site ranges may differCulture StatementDon't meet all desired requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single desired qualification. At Blue Origin, we are dedicated to building an authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every desired qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Benefits- Benefits include: Medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability, 401(k) with a company match of up to 5%, and an Education Support Program.
- Stock Options for all regular employees (working at least 20 hours/week)
- Paid Time Off: Up to four (4) weeks per year based on weekly scheduled hours, and up to 14 company-paid holidays.
- Dependent on role type and job level, employees may be eligible for benefits and bonuses based on the company's intent to reward individual contributions and enable them to share in the company's results, or other factors at the company's sole discretion. Bonus amounts and eligibility are not guaranteed and subject to change and cancellation. Please check with your recruiter for more details.
