Principal AI Platform Engineer

Role Description Are you a builder at heart who wants to shape how an entire engineering organization works with AI? We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help build TradeStation’s AI Platform from the ground up: the MCP gateway, AI portal, identity layer, and agentic flows that every other engineering team builds on. This is a deeply hands-on role for someone who codes the hardest problems themselves, sets the technical bar for the platform, and thrives where there is no pre-existing blueprint to follow. You will turn emerging AI capabilities into secure, reliable, reusable infrastructure that measurably accelerates how we ship software and serve our clients. What You’ll Be Doing Architect and hands-on build the core of the AI Platform: the MCP gateway, AI portal and skills marketplace, identity brokering layer, and agentic execution flows that the rest of engineering builds on. Take a hands-on approach to code the most complex or ambiguous solutions and set the technical bar for the platform. Design secure-by-default integrations between internal systems and AI agents, with proper authentication, authorization, RBAC, and audit logging. Build the telemetry and observability that make AI usage and spec-driven development measurable across the organization. Partner with engineering teams across the firm to turn their workflows into reusable skills, MCP servers, and agentic routines. Establish patterns, guardrails, and golden paths so teams can adopt AI tooling quickly, safely, and within governance standards. Champion best practices in software development, testing, and deployment, and ensure the scalability, reliability, and performance of platform services in a Kubernetes and DevOps environment. Continuously evaluate emerging models, frameworks, and agent patterns and fold the useful ones into the platform. Qualifications Deep, hands-on experience building and operating production backend services and developer platforms; you are a builder first. Mastery of 2 or more modern general-purpose programming languages, such as Python and TypeScript. Experience with Go or C# is a plus. Strong understanding of REST API design, GraphQL (building and consuming), and microservices architecture. Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) and container orchestration tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes). Experience building on or integrating with large language models and agentic systems: tool and function calling, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), retrieval, and evaluation. Solid grounding in identity and access management (OAuth2 / OIDC, SSO, RBAC); experience with Keycloak, Entra ID, or Auth0 is a strong plus. Familiarity with scripting and automation (e.g., Bash, PowerShell) and with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (e.g., GitLab CI, Helm). Comfort operating in ambiguity and an enthusiastic willingness to creatively solve problems for which there is no pre-existing blueprint. Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence and collaborate with engineers across diverse teams. Embraces AI as a core part of the daily workflow and a partner in problem-solving. Requirements Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience. Minimum 7 years of relevant software engineering experience. Demonstrated experience designing and building platform, infrastructure, or backend services used by other engineering teams. Desired Qualifications Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agentic applications (MCP servers, tool-calling agents, retrieval / RAG). Python and/or TypeScript / Node development experience. Identity and access management experience (Keycloak, Entra ID, or Auth0; OAuth2 / OIDC). Cloud architecture and deployment (AWS, EKS); hands-on Docker or Kubernetes experience. Experience with observability and telemetry tooling. Financial services or brokerage domain experience. Benefits Collaborative work environment. Competitive Salaries. Yearly bonus. Comprehensive benefits for you and your family starting Day 1. Unlimited Paid Time Off. Flexible working environment. TradeStation Account employee benefits, as well as full access to trading education materials. Pay Range (US) $155-175K (Countries outside of the US have differing ranges in accordance with local labor markets).