Principal Full Stack AI Engineer

Vertex focuses on turning AI into production-ready capabilities that improve how teams work. In a hybrid Boston role, you will build full-stack AI applications and agents end to end, partnering closely with users, product, and business stakeholders to address real workflow needs. You will also help shape reusable patterns and responsible AI practices so solutions scale reliably across the organization.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and productionize full-stack AI applications, agents, and multi-step workflows for internal and user-facing use cases
• Use a forward deployed engineering approach by working directly with end users, product teams, and business stakeholders to solve workflow problems quickly
• Build agents that can reason across steps, invoke tools, call APIs, retrieve information, and take actions within defined enterprise guardrails
• Own end-to-end delivery across user interfaces, application services, APIs, data access, agent orchestration, and integrations with internal platforms, third-party systems, and business-critical applications
• Create reusable agent patterns, components, prompts, tools, and orchestration logic that can be scaled across use cases
• Iterate on agent behavior using usage data, qualitative feedback, evaluation results, and operational metrics
• Improve agent quality through testing, experimentation, benchmarking, and structured measurement of outcomes
• Partner with platform, integration, data, security, and product teams to support agents that are secure, reliable, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise architecture
• Help define best practices for agent design, tool use, fallback behavior, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop workflows
• Support the full software lifecycle, including architecture, development, integration, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization in production environments
• Contribute to observability for agent execution, including logging, tracing, performance tracking, and issue analysis
• Ensure solutions are designed with security, compliance, and responsible AI principles
• Stay current on emerging patterns and technologies in generative AI and agentic systems, translating them into practical implementations at Vertex

Education and experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or related technical field (equivalent practical experience may be considered)
• Experience in full-stack software engineering, AI engineering, machine learning engineering, or intelligent application development
• Hands-on experience building and operating production applications powered by large language models, AI workflows, or agentic systems
• Experience designing and delivering end-to-end applications across front end, back end, APIs, data stores, and enterprise systems
• Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted software development and autonomous coding agents to design, generate, test, review, debug, optimize, and refactor code across complex enterprise systems
• Deep understanding of AI-native software engineering practices, including establishing standards, governance, and best practices for responsible use of AI coding assistants and engineering agents across teams
• Ability to move from prototype to production while balancing speed, quality, and operational rigor
• Experience working directly with users or stakeholders to iteratively refine technical solutions based on real-world needs
• Strong problem-solving and systems thinking
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams

Technical skills you’ll use

• Full-stack application development across modern front-end and back-end technologies
• Large language model application development
• Agentic workflow design and orchestration
• Prompt engineering and prompt iteration
• Tool use and API integration for AI agents
• Multi-step workflow automation, including rapid prototyping and productionization
• Evaluation, testing, and quality measurement for AI systems
• Application logging, monitoring, and observability
• API design, service development, data modeling, and application architecture
• Distributed systems and service integration
• Secure software development practices and enterprise application integration
• Cloud-based application development
• Version control, CI/CD, and deployment practices

Preferred skills

• Experience using a forward deployed engineering or similar embedded delivery model
• Experience building internal copilots, assistants, or task-oriented AI agents
• Familiarity with orchestration frameworks, agent runtimes, tool-calling architectures, and retrieval patterns
• Experience integrating with enterprise collaboration tools, workflow systems, document platforms, or knowledge repositories
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks for AI quality, groundedness, task completion, and reliability
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop workflows and safe failure or escalation mechanisms
• Exposure to AI observability, tracing, and operational analytics
• Experience in regulated industries such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, or life sciences

Compensation, location, and flexibility

• Location: Boston, MA (Hybrid)
• Pay range: $166,640 - $250,000 per year
• Flex designation: Hybrid-Eligible or On-Site Eligible
• Flex eligibility status (Hybrid-Eligible role): choose either Hybrid (work remotely up to two days per week) or On-Site (work five days per week on-site with ad hoc flexibility). Flex status is subject to Vertex’s Flex @ Vertex Program policy and may change.

Benefits

• Eligible for an annual bonus
• Annual equity awards
• Some roles may also be eligible for overtime pay, in accordance with federal and state requirements
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Generous paid time off, including a week-long company shutdown in the Summer and the Winter
• Educational assistance programs including student loan repayment
• Generous commuting subsidy
• Matching charitable donations
• 401(k)