Sr. Principal Engineer
Wonder · Washington · $305,000–$330,000 (stated in the posting)
About The Opportunity
We're looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to help stand up this team from its earliest days and bring AI-enabled development practices to Wonder Engineering. You'll design and build solutions to solve context fragmentation, MCPs/CLIs, skills, sub-agents, and integrations that connect AI tooling to Wonder's codebases and systems, and the AI-assisted workflows — code generation, review, testing, documentation, refactoring, on-call/incident management — that engineers use every day.
We’re looking for someone who brings proven AI-tooling developer patterns and practices from outside Wonder that we haven't yet discovered internally. You'll partner closely with the team's other engineers across the company, each of whom owns a distinct part of the developer-experience surface area, and with the platform, infrastructure, and application teams whose workflows you're improving.
The Impact You Will Make
- Build AI-Native Developer Tooling: Design and ship Context aggregation solutions, MCPs/CLIs, skills, and sub-agents that give AI coding tools sanctioned, reliable access to Wonder's codebases, services, and systems. Help define and stand up Wonder's autonomous development agents and cloud agent solutions.
- Bring Outside Patterns In: Bring a sharp point of view on where AI-assisted development actually creates leverage across review, testing, code generation, and documentation, and translate the best emerging practices into standards that fit Wonder's stack, scale, and constraints.
- Raise the Ceiling on Review: Contribute to pre-review and triage tooling that clears and automates mechanical and policy issues before a human looks, and help define standards for reviewing AI-generated code.
- Instrument for Efficiency, Not Just Adoption: Design and implement the systems that optimize AI costs across the org and abstract model selection away from engineers' day to day, so the platform routes each task to the right model at the right cost without every engineer having to reason about it. Help define and measure Developer velocity.
- Guide Technical Outcomes: Scope, design, and ship developer tooling with minimal oversight, weighing tradeoffs and partnering with platform, infrastructure, and application teams to land it in production.
- Communicate Effectively: Write clear specs and documentation, and provide, seek, and incorporate feedback from a team and organization still defining its own practices.
What You Bring to the Table
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including recent, hands-on work building with or on top of LLM-based tooling (agents, MCP servers, coding assistants, or similar).
- Direct experience integrating AI tools into real development workflows — code review, testing, code generation, or documentation — beyond individual use as an end user.
- Strong system design skills and a track record of owning tools or platforms end-to-end, from design through adoption.
- Comfort operating with ambiguity: this is a new team without established playbooks, and you'll be shaping them.
- Experience designing and consuming APIs, webhooks, or other integration/message-based systems.
- Experience building developer tooling, internal platforms, CI/CD systems, or other software used by engineers as its primary users.
- Experience with Java/JVM and/or Python is a plus, though not required.
- A pragmatic approach to problem solving and the ability to troubleshoot complex technical obstacles.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to drive technical discussions with engineers and leaders across multiple teams.
DC Base Salary: $305,000 - $330,000.
Wonder uses geographic-specific salary structures, which means the salary offered may vary depending on where the job is located. The final salary offer will take into account various factors, such as the candidate's skills, education, training, credentials, and experience.
Benefits
The benefits applicable to this role include a competitive compensation package with equity and a 401(k). We also offer a choice of medical, dental, and vision plans, company paid short and long term disability coverage, paid time off including flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable law in addition to paid parental leave, discounted meals and exclusive perks across the Wonder family of brands.
Eligibility, effective dates, and available plan options vary by employment classification and location. To learn more about benefits for this role, visit our Careers page here.
A Final Note
At Wonder, we build the best teams by hiring with an objective lens — evaluating people for their potential while championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, marital status, disability, or any other protected class. As part of our commitment to fair and compliant hiring practices, Wonder participates in the federal government's E-Verify program to confirm employment eligibility. If you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.
We look forward to hearing from you! We'll contact you via email or text to schedule interviews and share information about your candidacy.
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