Principal Software Engineer

Principal · Full Time

LondonUSD 190k – 280k3d ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Principal Software Engineer at UiPath, leading the design and development of enterprise-scale document processing systems powered by frontier LLMs and AI agents. This role requires 7+ years of experience building and operating large-scale commercial services, with deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, and production LLM infrastructure. You'll architect and ship mission-critical ingestion, extraction, and retrieval pipelines that handle anything from initial document processing to millions of documents in air-gapped environments, working across multi-cloud deployments while maintaining strict security and compliance standards.

Responsibilities

  • Design and Build AI Document Processing Pipelines: Architect end-to-end ingestion, parsing, extraction, indexing and retrieval systems that leverage frontier LLMs to convert enterprise documents (invoices, claims, contracts, emails) into structured data. Implement data extraction pipelines that work reliably from tens to millions of documents, ensuring consistency across all system components.
  • Lead Production LLM Systems at Enterprise Scale: Take ownership of shipping LLM-backed features to production, managing the complete lifecycle from model selection and prompt engineering to evaluation and monitoring. Build systems that maintain accuracy, security, and governance standards while operating at high volume. Establish evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and troubleshoot degradation in production.
  • Architect Distributed Systems for Multi-Environment Deployment: Design services that operate seamlessly across public cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP), on-premises infrastructure, and air-gapped datacenters with strict security and compliance requirements. Solve complex concurrency, latency, and distributed systems challenges to ensure platform reliability under high-volume production workloads.
  • Drive Product Outcomes from Concept to Production: Lead features from ideation through design, implementation, and production deployment. Measure success using quantitative metrics, identify performance gaps, and iterate to improve outcomes. Own the complete product development cycle rather than working task-by-task, ensuring solutions deliver real business value.
  • Mentor Engineers and Contribute to Engineering Culture: Guide and mentor team members on best practices in systems design, distributed computing, and LLM production engineering. Participate in code reviews, technical hiring, and architectural decisions. Push team standards forward by championing clean code, proper testing, and design patterns that make bad states unrepresentable.
  • Collaborate Across Teams and Customers: Work with product managers, engineers across UiPath locations, and customers directly to understand document processing requirements and product pain points. Facilitate knowledge transfer and innovation by learning how customers use the product in real-world scenarios and translating those insights into platform improvements.
  • Optimize Data Systems and Search Infrastructure: Make informed architectural decisions on storage systems, search indexes, and data pipeline technologies. Balance trade-offs between different data platforms while maintaining query performance, retrieval accuracy, and cost efficiency at enterprise scale.
  • Evaluate and Integrate Coding Agents: Establish pragmatic approaches to using AI coding agents as development tools, including evaluation frameworks, quality gates, and integration patterns. Develop team expertise in responsible use of coding agents while maintaining code quality and architectural standards.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Multi-Language Programming Proficiency

    Strong programming skills with ability to rapidly acquire new languages as problems demand. Production experience with Python, Rust, or C# strongly preferred. Demonstrated ability to choose appropriate languages and paradigms for specific system requirements.

  • System Design and Architecture

    Expertise in designing scalable, maintainable systems with careful consideration of failure modes, observability, and operational concerns. Ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between performance, maintainability, and development velocity.

  • SQL and Data Engineering

    Strong SQL proficiency including complex query optimization, schema design, and understanding of database internals. Experience with data pipeline tools and understanding of different storage architectures (relational, NoSQL, document stores, search indices).

  • Type Systems and Testing Frameworks

    Experience using strong type systems (Go, Rust, TypeScript) and comprehensive testing strategies to catch bugs before runtime. Ability to design systems where invalid states are unrepresentable and prefer compilation-time over runtime errors.

  • LLM Product Development and Evaluation

    Practical knowledge of LLM prompting techniques, prompt evaluation frameworks, and production model monitoring. Understanding of model drift, retraining strategies, and methods to measure model performance in production applications.

  • Document Processing Fundamentals (Preferred)

    Familiarity with OCR technology, document layout analysis, and the practical challenges of processing documents as they arrive in real-world scenarios. Understanding of different document types and extraction requirements.

  • Security and Compliance Architecture

    Experience designing systems that meet enterprise security, compliance, and governance requirements. Knowledge of encryption, access control, audit logging, and compliance frameworks relevant to financial and operational data.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Technical Discipline

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating strong fundamentals in software engineering principles and system design.

Experience

  • 7+ Years Building Enterprise-Scale Services

    Demonstrated track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale commercial services that real customers depend on for mission-critical operations. Experience managing systems that scale from small customer bases to high-volume production workloads.

  • Cloud Platform and Kubernetes Deployment

    Hands-on experience deploying and scaling containerized applications on Kubernetes across major cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, or GCP. Understanding of infrastructure-as-code, deployment patterns, monitoring, and platform scaling strategies.

  • Distributed Systems and High-Volume Data Processing

    Real-world experience designing and troubleshooting distributed systems handling high-volume workloads. Deep understanding of concurrency patterns, latency optimization, and reliable message passing across service boundaries.

  • Production LLM and AI Systems (Preferred)

    Experience shipping LLM-backed features to production, including prompt engineering, model evaluation, drift detection, and production monitoring. Understanding of the unique challenges in making AI systems reliable, fast, and trustworthy at enterprise scale.

  • Data Systems and Query Optimization

    Proficiency with SQL and experience optimizing queries for complex analytical and operational workloads. Understanding of trade-offs between relational databases, search systems, document stores, and caching layers.

Skills

Required

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Ability to architect systems that handle scale, failures, and eventual consistency. Experience with service-oriented architecture, microservices patterns, and inter-service communication protocols.

  • Production Python Programming

    Advanced Python development for enterprise applications, including async programming, performance optimization, and integration with systems like Kubernetes and cloud platforms.

  • Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps

    Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code, containerization, orchestration platforms, and cloud-native deployment patterns. Hands-on experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP ecosystems.

  • Data Pipeline Architecture

    Expertise building ingestion, transformation, and retrieval pipelines that process data reliably at scale. Understanding of batch and streaming systems, data quality validation, and performance optimization.

  • Systems Monitoring and Observability

    Deep knowledge of logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting strategies for distributed systems. Ability to design systems where operational state is visible and problems are quickly identifiable.

  • Problem-Solving and Learning Agility

    Demonstrated ability to rapidly understand complex problems, research solutions, learn new technologies independently, and make pragmatic architectural decisions under time and resource constraints.

Preferred

  • LLM Production Engineering

    Nice to have

    Experience building systems that use large language models in production, including prompt optimization, model evaluation, cost optimization, and latency reduction techniques. Understanding of different LLM APIs and deployment models.

  • Rust Systems Programming

    Nice to have

    Production experience with Rust for performance-critical components, systems programming, or distributed systems. Understanding of Rust's ownership model and how it prevents concurrency bugs.

  • C# and .NET Ecosystem

    Nice to have

    Experience with C# and .NET framework for enterprise applications, including async/await patterns, dependency injection, and integration with Azure cloud services.

  • Information Retrieval and Search

    Nice to have

    Experience with search technologies like Elasticsearch, vector databases, or other retrieval systems. Understanding of ranking algorithms, relevance tuning, and information extraction from documents.

  • AI Agent Architecture

    Nice to have

    Experience building or integrating agentic systems, including prompt engineering for multi-step reasoning, function calling patterns, and evaluation frameworks for agentic behavior.

  • Document Processing Technologies

    Nice to have

    Experience with OCR engines, document layout analysis, table extraction, or other document processing libraries. Understanding of layout-aware information extraction and challenges in real-world document quality.

  • Enterprise Security and Compliance

    Nice to have

    Experience designing systems that meet SOC2, FedRAMP, HIPAA, or other compliance requirements. Understanding of cryptography, key management, and audit logging at enterprise scale.

  • AI Code Generation Tools

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience using GitHub Copilot, Claude for code, or similar AI coding assistants. Developed opinions about when and how to use these tools effectively while maintaining code quality standards.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonRustC#SQL

Frameworks

KubernetesFastAPI / Django.NET CoreApache Spark

Databases

PostgreSQLElasticsearch / Vector DatabasesRedisDynamoDB / Azure Cosmos DB

Tools

DockerGit / GitHubAzure / AWS / GCPDatadog / Prometheus / ELK StackCI/CD Pipelines (GitHub Actions / Jenkins)LLM APIs and Frameworks

Other

Document Processing LibrariesPrompt Engineering and EvaluationDistributed Systems PatternsSecurity and EncryptionType Systems and Static Analysis

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 190,000 – 280,000

Full posting

Original listing.

Life at UiPath

The people at UiPath believe in the transformative power of automation to change how the world works. We’re committed to creating category-leading enterprise software that unleashes that power.

To make that happen, we need people who are curious, self-propelled, generous, and genuine. People who love being part of a fast-moving, fast-thinking growth company. And people who care—about each other, about UiPath, and about our larger purpose.

Could that be you?

Your mission

UiPath’s Intelligence Document Processing drives understanding of the documents and messages on which a business runs: invoices, claims, contracts, customer emails. We use frontier LLMs to turn all of that into structured data that automations and AI agents can act on. You'll be building the product that does it: the ingestion and extraction pipelines, the APIs customers build their operations on top of, and the systems that make those models useful, fast and trustworthy at enterprise scale.

Increasingly that work is agentic. What you build is what lets AI agents ingest, understand, retrieve and reason over enterprise documents at volume, without giving up accuracy, security or governance.

It's a product engineering role with complex systems and LLM-in-production problems underneath it. The same service handles a customer's first ten documents and another's ten million, runs in our cloud and inside a bank's own air-gapped datacentre, and has to be good enough that a business will act on its output. Knowing how well the models are actually doing, and what to do when the answer is "not well enough", is a large part of the job.

You'll write in several languages here, and pick up new ones as the problem demands. We care much more about how you think than about what you've written it in. We're looking for someone who loves building things, learns fast, and wants to own product outcomes rather than tickets.

 

What you'll do at UiPath

  • Work with engineers, product managers and customers to design, build and operate the AI systems behind UiPath's document processing products.

  • Build across the pipeline: ingestion, parsing and extraction, indexing and retrieval, and the evaluation that tells us any of it is working.

  • Take features from idea to production and stay with them, measuring whether they actually worked, and improving them when they didn't.

  • Solve genuinely hard problems in concurrency, latency and distributed systems, so the platform holds up under high-volume production workloads.

  • Build for environments we don't control: multi-cloud, on-premises, air-gapped, and under strict security and compliance requirements.

  • Use coding agents as a serious part of your toolkit, and help the team get better at it. Where to trust them, where not to, and how to keep quality high as the tooling changes underneath us.

  • Work with teams across UiPath and across locations to innovate and build best-in-class document processing, and occasionally with customers directly. Because the fastest way to understand a product is to watch someone use it.

  • Contribute to our engineering culture: mentor, review, hire, and push back when something isn't good enough.

 

What you'll bring to the team

  • A solid track record (7+ years) building and operating large-scale commercial services that real customers depend on.

  • Strong programming ability and the confidence to pick up whatever language a problem calls for. You'll meet Python, Rust and C# here, but we don't expect you to arrive knowing them all.

  • Real-world experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP) and containerised deployment on Kubernetes. You understand how production systems get shipped, monitored and scaled, not just written.

  • Comfort with data at scale: SQL, and the trade-offs between different storage and search systems.

  • Experience working with coding agents, and opinions about them, What responsible use looks like, where they earn their keep and where they cost you, and how you keep evaluating them in an ecosystem that changes every few months.

  • An appreciation for tools that catch bugs before runtime — type systems, tests, and designs that make bad states unrepresentable. Especially in the age of coding agents.

  • A pragmatic grasp of computer science fundamentals. We care about solving real problems with the right data structure, not reciting one from a textbook.

  • Experience shipping LLM-backed products to production is a strong plus: prompting, evaluation, and everything else that turns a model into a feature people will trust.

  • Familiarity with document processing is a plus: OCR, layout, and the messy reality of documents as they actually arrive.

  • An opinion on what makes good code and good architecture, and the ability to argue it, including against us.

  • You're a builder and a problem-solver at heart.

Maybe you don’t tick all the boxes above—but still think you’d be great for the job? Go ahead, apply anyway. Please. Because we know that experience comes in all shapes and sizes—and passion can’t be learned.

Many of our roles allow for flexibility in when and where work gets done. Depending on the needs of the business and the role, the number of hybrid, office-based, and remote workers will vary from team to team. Applications are assessed on a rolling basis and there is no fixed deadline for this requisition. The application window may change depending on the volume of applications received or may close immediately if a qualified candidate is selected.

We value a range of diverse backgrounds, experiences and ideas. We pride ourselves on our diversity and inclusive workplace that provides equal opportunities to all persons regardless of age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression, national origin, disability, neurodiversity, military and/or veteran status, or any other protected classes. Additionally, UiPath provides reasonable accommodations for candidates on request and respects applicants' privacy rights. To review these and other legal disclosures, visit our privacy policy.

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