About the job
Autodesk is building a shared AI-assisted commerce platform that enables AI copilots and agents to safely discover, recommend, and transact Autodesk offerings. As a Principal Engineer, you will design and build the core APIs and orchestration layer (MCP) that connects AI systems to Autodesk’s commerce infrastructure—pricing, subscriptions, entitlements, and checkout—with enterprise-grade reliability, security, and governance. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, distributed systems, and applied AI enablement.
Responsibilities
Build the AI-to-commerce orchestration layer (MCP): Design and implement the runtime and APIs that allow copilots/agents to invoke commerce capabilities safely and consistently (e.g., product discovery → pricing → eligibility/entitlements → checkout)
Define “agent-safe” platform primitives: Create standardized patterns for tool invocation (idempotency, retries, rate limits, validation), error contracts, and deterministic behaviors suitable for LLM/agent workflows
Integrate with core commerce systems: Build adapters and service interfaces to existing commerce capabilities (pricing, subscriptions, entitlements, checkout), including backward compatibility and rollout strategies
Enterprise reliability & operability: Own service SLOs/SLIs, observability (logs/metrics/traces), resilience patterns, and incident readiness; drive post-incident improvements
Security & governance by design: Implement strong authN/authZ, tenant isolation, secrets management, auditability, policy enforcement, and safe guardrails around agent actions (approvals, constraints, and traceability)
Platform quality and developer experience: Provide SDKs, documentation, reference implementations, and golden paths so product teams can integrate agents quickly and safely
Technical leadership at P4 scope: Drive architecture decisions across teams, lead design reviews/RFCs, mentor engineers, and influence roadmaps across the commerce + AI ecosystem
Qualifications
Minimum
10+ years building and operating production backend/platform systems
Deep knowledge of distributed systems: scaling, failure modes, consistency, caching, queues/streams, concurrency, idempotency, and backpressure
Strong backend proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Java/Kotlin, Node Js), plus strong API design (REST/gRPC) and data modeling
Experience with cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC), and building reliable services with modern observability
Proven ability to lead cross-team initiatives through ambiguity, balancing platform correctness, security, and product velocity
Preferred
Experience designing platforms for automation/agents (workflow orchestration, tool routing, policy engines, approvals, audit trails)
Commerce domain exposure: pricing catalogs, subscription lifecycle, entitlement checks, tax/payment/checkout flows
Multi-tenant enterprise patterns: tenant isolation, RBAC/ABAC, compliance-minded logging, data retention
Experience building internal platforms with adoption metrics, SDKs, and versioned contracts