We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer II to join our AI Enablement product family within the Consulting & Embedded Experts team. In this role, you will operate as a trusted technical advisor and hands-on engineer, partnering directly with product and business teams to accelerate the safe, secure, and scalable adoption of AI across the enterprise.

Rather than owning a single product, you will embed with teams, shape solutions, and help scale AI capability through reusable patterns, platforms, and accelerators aligned to enterprise strategy.

Drive AI Adoption & Business Value

• Partner with product and business teams to identify and deliver high-impact AI use cases aligned to enterprise priorities
• Translate ambiguous business problems into practical, production-ready AI solutions
• Focus on delivering value aligned to measurable outcomes and ROI

Embed with Teams as a Technical Expert

• Act as an embedded engineer/architect within delivery teams to accelerate AI solution design and implementation
• Bridge the gap between central AI enablement capabilities and domain-specific business needs
• Collaborate in a federated operating model, enabling teams while maintaining enterprise standards

Build & Scale Reusable AI Capabilities

• Contribute to and leverage enterprise AI platforms, MLOps/LLMOps capabilities, and reusable accelerators
• Create reusable patterns (e.g., RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, guardrails) that reduce time-to-market and cost  
• Help drive critical mass adoption of AI platforms across engineering teams

Ensure Safe, Secure, and Sustainable AI

• Design AI solutions that meet enterprise standards for security, governance, and responsible AI
• Implement guardrails, evaluation strategies, and monitoring to ensure trusted AI outcomes and customer protection
• Champion sustainable engineering practices including reusability, scalability, and governance alignment

Shape Technical Direction & Capability Maturity

• Assess emerging AI technologies and guide teams on when and how to adopt them responsibly
• Help teams move up the AI maturity curve—from point solutions to enterprise-scale, embedded AI capabilities
• Influence architecture decisions that enable long-term transformation, not just short-term delivery

Enable & Elevate Others

• Mentor engineers and product teams on AI best practices, architecture, and delivery approaches
• Act as a force multiplier, enabling teams rather than becoming a bottleneck
• Contribute to internal knowledge sharing, playbooks, and AI community building (e.g., demos, patterns, guidance)

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including building and scaling distributed systems
• Experience working in complex, matrixed environments with multiple stakeholders
• Strong ability to operate in ambiguity and move between strategy and hands-on delivery
• Proven ability to influence without authority and drive adoption across teams
• Excellent communication skills—able to translate between technical and business audiences

Skills That Will Help You Stand Out

• Experience building AI/ML or GenAI solutions in production environments
• Familiarity with LLMOps, MLOps, evaluation frameworks, and AI guardrails
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) and modern data/AI architectures
• Background in solution architecture, consulting, or platform engineering
• Experience building reusable frameworks, accelerators, or internal platforms

Work Environment

This role offers in-office and hybrid (blending at least three office days in a typical workweek), in Des Moines, IA or Charlotte, NC. You’ll work with your leader to figure out which option may align best based on several factors.

Hours

This role will partner with our global teams and has an expectation for flexibility in your work schedule to have a regular start time around 7:30-8:00 am CST a few days a week.  

Work Authorization/Sponsorship

At this time, we're not considering candidates that need any type of immigration sponsorship now or in the future or those needing work authorization for this role. (This includes, but is not limited to students on F1-OPT, F1-CPT, J-1, etc.) 

Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants

Investment Code of Ethics

For Principal Global Investors positions, you’ll need to follow an Investment Code of Ethics related to personal and business conduct as well as personal trading activities for you and members of your household. These same requirements may also apply to other positions across the organization.

Experience Principal

At Principal, we value connecting on both a personal and professional level. Together, we’re imagining a more purpose-led future for financial services – and that starts with you. Our success depends on the unique experiences, backgrounds, and talents of our employees. And we support our employees the same way we support our customers: with comprehensive, competitive benefit offerings crafted to protect their physical, financial, and social well-being. Check out our careers site to learn more about our purpose, values and benefits.

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