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).