Principal Engineer, AI Factory

About this role

Banyan Software is the best permanent home for software businesses that serve specialized industries, their employees, and their customers. We are on a mission to acquire, build, and grow great companies worldwide, helping them modernize through shared AI expertise and operational discipline. The Banyan Software Foundation, endowed with $100 million in Banyan stock, leverages technology to build a greener and more equitable world. Banyan is Great Place to Work Certified, a five-time Inc. 5000 honoree, and a top 10 company on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Atlanta, Banyan operates more than 100 portfolio companies across North America, the UK, EU, and APAC.

Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Principal Engineer to drive the engineering and execution efforts for our new AI Application Modernization Factory. This is a deeply technical and hands-on role critical for designing, building, and delivering the high-quality, AI-enabled software development automation tools and services that are the core products of the factory. The ideal candidate will possess expert-level cloud mastery, a deep-seated commitment to engineering excellence, and a proven ability to translate complex product requirements into highly scalable, secure, and resilient technical implementations, operating within the established architectural standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-on Software Engineering: Act as a hands-on Principal Engineer, making significant code contributions, performing complex code reviews, and serving as the highest technical escalation point for engineering challenges in the AI Application Modernization Factory.

• AI Automation System Development: Design, build, and deploy the core AI-enabled software development automation tools and services (e.g., custom agents, GenAI integrations) with a keen focus on legacy software analysis, requirement extraction, and architectural discovery leveraging multi-modal GenAI capabilities..

• Technical Design & Implementation: Own the technical design and implementation of features and services, ensuring they adhere to the factory’s established technical architecture, design patterns, and engineering best practices.

• GenAI Feature Integration: Implement Generative AI capabilities, including RAG (and GraphRAG) systems and LLM orchestration, into the automation tools to build new intelligent features and automate business processes.

• Modernization Execution Support: Drive the technical strategy for developing automation tools that aid in modernizing legacy applications to a cloud-native, microservices, or serverless architecture across major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Engineering Vision & Mentorship: Serve as a top technical authority, defining and enforcing engineering standards and quality across product areas. Lead, mentor, and coach senior and junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing.

• Engineering Excellence & Ownership: Drive an ownership mindset by taking pride in work quality and seeing projects through to successful deployment and operation. Set a high bar for engineering standards, security, and operational excellence.

• Problem Solving: Apply strong analytical and structured problem-solving skills including technical problem definition, functional decomposition, and hypothesis-driven investigation to resolve complex engineering and operational challenges, with the ability to make confident technical decisions when problems or solutions are not well-defined (ambiguity).

• Security, Observability & Reliability: Implement secure-by-design principals along with robust cloud-native observability tooling to debug and monitor complex distributed systems, ensuring secure, high performance and high availability operations.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent technical area and/or experience.

• Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, with significant time spent in a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or Architect role.

• Expert Cloud Mastery: Expert-level experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) (e.g., EC2, Lambda, EKS, S3, RDS) and proven mastery of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) using Terraform for provisioning and managing large-scale cloud environments. Deep expertise in container (e.g., Docker / Kubernetes) and serverless (e.g., Lambda, Azure Functions) technologies for building highly scalable and resilient distributed architectures.

• Hands-on Technical Depth: Deep history of hands-on software engineering, making significant code contributions, and leading technical design and implementation. A player/coach who can provide thorough code reviews and upskill team members (both human and…