Principal Engineer - Agentic AI Applications

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world’s leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There's an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change.

With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, and China, we are thrilled to be expanding our global footprint, landing our new hub in Bengaluru, India. With a rapid growth plan in place, we’re hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

You will define how autonomous AI agents are designed, orchestrated, and deployed at scale, moving beyond simple wrappers to create robust, deterministic systems out of non-deterministic models. You will partner closely with Product, Research, and Platform teams to turn cutting-edge LLM capabilities into reliable, high-availability products.

This role can be based in either Washington or California State.

We aren't just building prototypes; we are building the autonomous backbone of the modern enterprise. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the technical vision and architecture for our next-generation agentic AI applications.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the Agentic Runtime: Own the end-to-end technical architecture for agentic systems, including multi-agent orchestration, memory management, and reasoning pipelines.
• Engineering for Reliability: Implement robust infrastructure to handle non-deterministic loops, including automated circuit-breakers, latency-aware orchestration (targeting P99 SLAs), and granular token/cost-observability.
• Set the Standard: Define engineering patterns, design standards, and best practices for agentic application development across the entire organization.
• Scale the Team: Mentor and grow Senior engineers; conduct deep-dive architecture reviews and drive high-stakes technical decision-making and be instrumental in the hiring process.
• Bridge the Gap: Partner with AI Ops to ensure agentic workloads are efficiently built, served, and monitored with state-of-the-art observability.

• The Experience: 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years in technical leadership or principal-level roles.
• The Expertise: Deep hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered or agentic systems to production (utilizing frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or custom-built runtimes).
• The Systems Mindset: A proven track record of architecting distributed, high-availability systems. You understand that "it worked on my machine" is not the same as "it works at scale."
• The Toolkit: Mastery of Python and modern backend frameworks. Deep familiarity with RAG pipelines, vector databases, tool-calling APIs, and multi-step reasoning. (TypeScript/Node.js is a plus).
• The Communicator: Ability to distill complex "black box" AI concepts into clear technical roadmaps for executive stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
• The Culture: A desire to influence org-wide engineering culture, prioritizing code quality, observability, and rigorous testing in an AI-first world.