Principal AI .NET Engineer

Our black belt specialists are leaders in their domains, serving as digital champions, delivery focused experts, top tier security professionals, AI thought leaders, and engineering best practice advocates.

As 1 of Australias fastest growing software businesses, Software at Scale delivers cutting edge technology solutions that power mission critical platforms. We solve complex engineering challenges at scale, driving quality, performance, and resilience through the strength of our people.

The Role and The Challenge

We are seeking an exceptional, highly energetic, and proactive Principal AI .NET Engineer who acts as an elite technical partner rather than a transactional ticket taker. You will inject momentum into complex enterprise environments, eliminate operational friction, and lead the fusion of deep .NET engineering with advanced agentic AI systems to modernise our backend platforms.

If you are content with picking up standard tickets, writing boilerplate code, or using AI only for simple code completion, this is not the role for you. We want a true domain leader who brings high energy, challenges the status quo with respectful thought leadership, and takes complete architectural ownership of production-grade AI platforms. You will step into a high trust and fully empowered environment where you will build robust agentic workflows, integrate non-deterministic AI endpoints securely into core .NET services, evaluate LLM performance metrics, and own production operations end to end inside AWS.

Access to AI Tooling: We believe in removing friction so you can focus on solving hard problems. You will have full access to enterprise AI tooling, including Claude Code, to assist you in accelerating code generation, refactoring, and pipeline management.

Key Responsibilities

• Thought Leadership and Squad Uplift: Act as an energetic domain leader, energising engineering squads, providing constructive architectural guidance with empathy, and raising engineering standards from day 1.
• AI Agentic System Design: Architect and build autonomous AI agentic workflows and production AI platforms designed to modernise existing .NET backend services and automate complex enterprise logic.
• Non-Deterministic Model Integration: Integrate production-grade foundational models (such as Claude API endpoints) into core .NET services, expertly handling non-deterministic JSON responses, streaming payloads, and resilient retry patterns.
• AI Performance Evaluation & System Tuning: Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure AI output quality, latency, token efficiency, and drift, continuously implementing system tweaks to optimise platform performance.
• Deep .NET Architecture: Design and build production grade systems around the core principles of the .NET framework, mastering Common Language Runtime internals, asynchronous programming patterns, and memory efficiency to eliminate thread starvation.
• High Volume API Engineering: Architect high throughput RESTful APIs and distributed workflows, handling extreme traffic variability using message queues, asynchronous background workers, and idempotent transaction patterns.
• AWS DevOps and Infrastructure: Deploy and scale .NET and AI workloads inside AWS, managing Amazon ECS containerisation, infrastructure as code, automated GitHub Actions or TeamCity pipelines, and secure secret management via secure vaults.

What You Bring (Attitude and Mindset)

• Consultant Identity: You present as a trusted technical partner who takes complete ownership of business outcomes, eliminates team friction, and drives solutions rather than waiting for top down direction.
• High Energy Thought Leader: You bring infectious enthusiasm, strategic vision, and hands on technical leadership to the team, acting as a true champion of engineering best practices.
• Proactive Problem Solver: You do not wait to be handed answers. When faced with broad or open ended problems, you pause, clarify boundaries and constraints, and collaborate to map out execution paths.
• Master of Constraints: You respect legacy design decisions and regulatory limitations while pragmatically navigating constraints to keep project momentum high.

What You Bring (Technically)

• Principal Level Leadership: Proven commercial experience operating at a Principal or Staff Engineer level within modern and high performing engineering teams, leading architectural transformation and mentoring talent.
• AI Agentic Engineering Expertise: Demonstrated, hands-on experience building production-grade AI agents and autonomous orchestration systems using modern patterns.
• Enterprise LLM Integration: Deep commercial experience integrating non-deterministic AI models (such as Claude) into enterprise .NET services, handling prompt safety, structured JSON outputs, and state management.
• AI Evaluation & Optimisation Acumen: Proven ability to monitor, evaluate, and tune production AI performance to ensure continuous platform improvement and reliability.
• The Depths of .NET Mastery: You understand the absolute depths of CSharp and .NET, with elite knowledge of runtime internals, garbage collection, thread pool behavior, and async state machine optimisation.
• Production Operations & DevOps Mastery: Extensive commercial experience deploying and operating .NET workloads on AWS (ECS, SQS/SNS, Secrets Manager), coupled with robust DevOps and pipeline expertise.

What We Offer

• The chance to work for 1 of Australias fastest growing and most innovative software businesses.
• Access to the latest AI tooling to assist you in achieving your technical goals.
• Meaningful and hands on engineering work solving truly interesting and complex problems.
• Clear growth pathways from Principal and beyond.
• A low ceremony and delivery focused environment that values engineers who own outcomes.
• Competitive remuneration and benefits.