Edtech.com's Summary

Frontline Education is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Backend & AI Workflow Integration. The role involves leading the design and development of scalable back-end systems using C#, .NET, and cloud platforms, while driving AI-enabled workflow integration to improve product capabilities, automation, and compliance in a regulated environment. The position requires technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and ensuring secure and responsible AI adoption.

Highlights

Lead design and development of enterprise-grade back-end systems with C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, APIs, microservices, and cloud-native patterns.
Architect scalable, secure, and compliant services supporting regulated product workflows.
Drive AI workflow integration using LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, and AI governance.
Partner across teams including product, UX, data, security, and compliance to translate business requirements to technical solutions.
Establish and enforce engineering standards for security, testing, observability, and production readiness.
Mentor and evangelize AI best practices, responsible AI usage, and ongoing AI capability development within the engineering organization.
Strong knowledge required in C#, .NET, cloud platforms (preferably AWS), distributed systems, relational and NoSQL databases, and secure software development practices.
Experience working in regulated, compliance-heavy industries like healthcare, finance, or enterprise SaaS.
Compensation range $160,000-$190,000 per year with bonus eligibility, 401(k) match, health benefits, stock purchase plan, paid time off, and tuition reimbursement.
Preferred experience with AI orchestration frameworks, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI APIs, DevSecOps, and regulatory compliance standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Principal Software Engineer, Backend & AI Workflow Integration Full Description

Principal Software Engineer, Backend & AI Workflow Integration

Location: United States

Description

Principal Software Engineer, Backend & AI Workflow Integration

Department: Engineering
Reports To: Manager of Software Engineering
Level: Principal Individual Contributor / Technical Lead
Location: Hybrid / Remote
Employment Type: Full-Time

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer with deep expertise in back-end .NET engineering, enterprise platform architecture, and the practical integration of AI-enabled workflows into complex software products. This role is ideal for a senior technical leader who can operate as both a hands-on engineer and an AI evangelist across the engineering organization.

You will lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and compliant back-end services while helping shape how our product organization uses AI to improve workflows, decision support, automation, developer productivity, and customer outcomes. Because we operate in a regulatory and compliance-driven industry, this role requires strong judgment around data governance, security, auditability, explainability, privacy, and responsible AI adoption.

The right candidate will not only know how to build enterprise-grade systems in C#, .NET, APIs, distributed services, databases, and cloud platforms, but will also be actively engaged with modern AI architectures, including LLM-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic patterns, model orchestration, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and AI governance practices.

This is a high-impact technical leadership role for someone who can set direction, mentor senior engineers, influence architecture, and raise the organization’s AI maturity.

Key Responsibilities

Back-End Engineering & Architecture

Lead the design, development, and evolution of enterprise-grade back-end systems using C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, Web APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native patterns.

Architect scalable, resilient, secure, and observable services that support mission-critical product workflows in a regulated environment.

Drive technical decisions around service boundaries, API design, asynchronous processing, data models, integration patterns, performance, reliability, and operational supportability.

Partner with product managers, UX, data, security, compliance, and infrastructure teams to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into robust technical solutions.

Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, maintainability, secure development, CI/CD, observability, and production readiness.

Participate directly in implementation, code reviews, design reviews, troubleshooting, and critical technical decisions.

AI Workflow Integration

Lead the technical strategy and implementation of AI-enabled workflows within the enterprise product platform.

Identify opportunities where AI can improve product capabilities, automate repetitive workflows, enhance user decision-making, improve operational efficiency, or accelerate internal engineering productivity.

Design and implement AI architectures that may include LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, semantic search, prompt orchestration, model APIs, agents, workflow engines, evaluation pipelines, MCP and human-in-the-loop review patterns.

Ensure AI capabilities are integrated safely into existing enterprise systems with appropriate controls for security, compliance, privacy, auditability, explainability, and reliability.

Collaborate with data engineering, machine learning, product, compliance, and security stakeholders to define AI use cases, success metrics, risk controls, and production readiness criteria.

Evaluate AI vendors, frameworks, APIs, model hosting options, orchestration platforms, and emerging architectural patterns to determine what is appropriate for enterprise use.

Develop reusable AI integration patterns, reference architectures, internal libraries, and best practices that can be adopted across multiple product teams.

AI Evangelism & Technical Leadership

Serve as an AI evangelist across the engineering organization, helping teams understand how to responsibly and effectively use AI in both product features and software delivery practices.

Stay current on AI trends, tools, architectures, model capabilities, regulatory considerations, and industry best practices, then translate that knowledge into actionable guidance for the development organization.

Create internal enablement materials, technical talks, proof-of-concepts, architecture guidance, coding standards, and adoption playbooks for AI-assisted development and AI-powered product capabilities.

Mentor engineers on AI fundamentals, prompt design, secure AI usage, evaluation methods, model limitations, hallucination mitigation, data privacy risks, and responsible implementation patterns.

Champion practical AI adoption without hype, ensuring that solutions are measurable, maintainable, compliant, and aligned to real business outcomes.

Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership on AI strategy, platform modernization, architecture tradeoffs, and talent development.

Compliance, Security & Governance

Design software and AI workflows that meet the expectations of a regulatory/compliance-driven environment, including strong consideration for data protection, audit trails, access controls, traceability, retention, explainability, and change management.

Work closely with security, legal, compliance, and risk stakeholders to ensure AI integrations follow appropriate governance standards.

Help establish engineering practices for responsible AI usage, including model evaluation, prompt/version control, test harnesses, monitoring, fallback strategies, human review, and escalation workflows.

Ensure sensitive data is protected when interacting with AI models, third-party APIs, vector stores, logs, telemetry systems, and developer productivity tools.

Contribute to internal policies and standards around secure AI-assisted development, AI-generated code review, data handling, and production AI feature deployment.

Required Qualifications

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in back-end development and enterprise software systems.

Expert-level proficiency with C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, RESTful APIs, service-oriented architecture, modern back-end design patterns and MS SQL Server.

Proven experience designing and delivering complex, scalable, high-availability enterprise systems.

Strong understanding of cloud-native development, preferably with AWS or similar platforms.

Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar technologies.

Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts, including messaging, queues, event-driven architecture, resiliency patterns, caching, observability, and fault tolerance.

Hands-on experience integrating AI, machine learning, LLMs, or automation capabilities into production or near-production software systems.

Familiarity with modern AI concepts such as LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, vector embeddings, MCP, semantic search, model orchestration, AI agents, evaluation frameworks, and responsible AI practices.

Experience working in a regulated, compliance-heavy, or security-sensitive industry such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, legal tech, government, life sciences, energy, or enterprise SaaS.

Strong understanding of secure software development practices, identity and access management, data privacy, encryption, logging, auditability, and compliance-aware architecture.

Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams without requiring formal people-management authority.

Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical and AI concepts to engineers, product leaders, executives, security teams, and compliance stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with AWS Bedrock, OpenAI APIs, Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft Foundry, LangChain, LlamaIndex, SpecKit, vector databases, or comparable AI orchestration and retrieval frameworks.

Experience building AI workflows that include human-in-the-loop review, audit trails, confidence scoring, explainability, model evaluation, or risk-based controls.

Experience designing systems that comply with frameworks or standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, FERPA, HITRUST, PCI, GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST, or similar regulatory expectations.

Experience with domain-driven design, clean architecture, hexagonal architecture, event sourcing, CQRS, or other enterprise architecture patterns.

Experience with DevSecOps, CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, containerization, Kubernetes, and cloud platform engineering.

Prior experience creating technical roadmaps, reference architectures, engineering standards, or internal developer platforms.

Experience mentoring staff-level or senior engineers and influencing engineering culture across multiple teams.

Familiarity with AI-assisted software development tools and practices, including code generation, automated testing, code review augmentation, documentation generation, and secure usage guidelines.

About Frontline Education

Frontline Education is a pioneer of school administration software purpose-built for K–12 districts. We provide innovative, connected solutions for student and special programs, business operations, and human capital management with powerful data and analytics to empower educators and administrators. We earn the trust of K–12 leaders across the U.S. by serving as a consistently high-performing, forthright partner of school districts through every dimension of the company.

We’re a group of unique and talented individuals who love what we do. We believe in servant leadership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and balancing great work with a healthy life outside of it.

Frontline embraces diversity, equity, and inclusivity and is an equal opportunity employer.

Our Mission, Our People, Our Purpose

At Frontline Education, we’re reimagining what’s possible by becoming an AI-first organization, transforming how we think, work, and serve the educators who shape our schools every day. By using AI in thoughtful, practical ways, we’re creating tools that help educators save time, gain insights, and focus more on what matters most, their students.

As part of our team, you’ll be expected and empowered to build and apply AI skillsets that grow with you, because at Frontline Education, technology amplifies what matters most: the human drive to learn, improve, and make a difference.

Compensation & Benefits

$160,000-$190,000 a year salary

• Bonus eligibility and long-term incentive opportunities
• 401(k) with company match
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Generous paid time off and tuition reimbursement

Inclusion, Belonging & Equal Opportunity

Frontline Education is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. We aspire to have an inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join our team.

Interview Process & Data Privacy

As part of our interview process, Frontline uses video conferencing tools that include photo capture and may include automated transcription features. A screenshot or photo will be taken at the start of the interview for internal identification and record-keeping purposes only, and transcription may be used to support notetaking and evaluation consistency. These materials are used solely by our recruiting and hiring teams, stored securely, and not shared outside the hiring process. Candidates may opt out of the transcription at any time by notifying their recruiter in advance. Frontline processes this information in accordance with applicable data privacy laws and only for legitimate business purposes related to recruitment and hiring.

Original Job Description