Standard Template Labs · 1 month ago
Principal Software Engineer (Applied AI)
Manhattan, NY
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
10+ years expStandard Template Labs is a stealth-mode, AI-native startup reimagining the future of IT Service and Configuration Management. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI to own the technical vision for embedding intelligence throughout their platform, ensuring high-quality AI systems and mentoring senior engineers.
Computer Software
Responsibilities
Architect the core intelligence layer of the platform, integrating LLMs, agents, vector search, retrieval pipelines, and graph reasoning directly into enterprise workflows
Identify high-impact opportunities where generative, predictive, or autonomous AI can eliminate operational toil, improve system understanding, or enhance decision-making
Lead architectural decisions around model selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure (custom vs OSS vs third-party APIs)
Establish best practices for AI-first engineering—including prompt design, context assembly, evaluators, guardrails, and continuous model monitoring
Partner with leadership to align AI capabilities with product strategy and customer outcomes
Build production-grade workflows powered by LLMs and agents, including automated enrichment, anomaly explanation, topology generation, and natural language querying
Design distributed systems that efficiently support high-throughput inference, embedding generation, and graph reasoning
Implement retrieval-augmented pipelines, embeddings, and vector search to power intelligent insights and contextual understanding
Write clean, well-structured code—and champion the use of AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) to accelerate productivity and quality
Continuously evaluate emerging AI frameworks, agent runtimes, orchestration tools, and model APIs, integrating them where they drive real user value
Mentor engineers on applied AI patterns, system design for AI workloads, and practical approaches to model integration
Lead design reviews and architecture deep-dives focused on delivering reliable, safe, and scalable AI systems
Help attract and develop top engineering talent excited about AI-native platforms and intelligent automation
Qualification
Required
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including technical leadership within complex, high-scale systems
A track record of architecting and shipping distributed systems with meaningful AI or automation components
Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, or model integration patterns
Strong system design expertise across data modeling, event-driven architecture, caching, storage, and performance optimization
Proficiency in a modern programming language (Go, Rust, Python, Java, or C++)
Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving engineering best practices
Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and modern DevOps/tooling
Preferred
Experience operationalizing ML/LLM workloads in production
Background in microservices, event-driven systems, or real-time data pipelines
Prior work in high-throughput, low-latency, or mission-critical systems
Open-source contributions or examples of technical leadership in distributed systems or AI tooling
Benefits
Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits package
Company
Standard Template Labs
Standard Template Labs is building a new system that learns how enterprise work happens and applies that understanding to reduce manual coordination
Founded in 2025New York, NY, US
11-50 employeesFunding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase