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Reports to:
Chief Technology Officer
The Opportunity
Every engineering organisation is adopting AI copilots. That is table stakes. What separates the best from the rest is whether AI is a tool on a developer's laptop or a systematic participant in how the organisation delivers software.
At Bullish, we have chosen the latter. Our north star is a fully autonomous development workflow where engineers focus on what matters most: specifications, testing harnesses, and validation — while AI agents handle the predictable work. The foundational systems are already in production. We need someone to lead this forward.
As Principal Engineer, you will be the technical authority for AI and agentic engineering across Bullish. You will shape the architecture, build the systems, and drive the organisational shift from AI-assisted to AI-native software delivery.
The Role
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will:
- Build the agent infrastructure that lets AI agents discover each other, communicate, and coordinate — so any team can deploy an agent and it joins the ecosystem
- Evolve our autonomous coding pipeline — task in, pull request out, with deterministic multi-agent execution, full cost control, and human review before merge
- Make engineering standards executable — encoding conventions as AI behaviours that activate in developer workflows, not documents pinned to a wiki
- Transform the delivery pipeline — auditing every manual gate and either automating it, replacing it with an agent, or justifying its retention as a deliberate human decision point
- Own AI infrastructure end to end — model routing, LLM proxy, cost attribution, evaluation frameworks, and observability for production AI systems
What You’ll Do
- Set the technical direction for AI and agentic systems across the engineering organisation
- Design and build production systems: agent orchestration, autonomous coding pipelines, LLMOps infrastructure
- Stay hands-on: write code, review PRs, debug production issues, and set the technical bar
- Evaluate new models, frameworks, and techniques as the landscape evolves — and bring what works into the organisation
- Establish metrics and observability for agent output quality, cost, and throughput
- Recruit and mentor engineers as the function grows, while remaining a primary contributor yourself
- Partner with the AI Enablement team to provide the technical foundation for business team AI adoption
What You’ll Bring
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including significant recent work with LLM and agent systems
- Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar)
- Direct experience designing and building agentic workflows or multi-agent systems — not just using copilots, but building the infrastructure behind them
- Mastery of backend development, distributed systems, and Python
- Strong LLMOps skills: CI/CD for AI systems, production observability, cost attribution, and spend control
- Experience deploying AI coding agents or developer tools to engineering teams
- Ability to influence technical direction across an organisation and build consensus for architectural decisions
Nice to Haves
- Experience in digital assets, blockchain, or traditional financial services
- Experience fine-tuning and deploying open-source LLMs in production
- Experience with data privacy and security compliance in a regulated environment
Bullish US LLC & CoinDesk Inc. are committed to offering competitive compensation and benefits. The anticipated base salary for this position is $200,000 - $325,000 + discretionary annual target bonus + performance incentives/benefits. Offered salary will be reflective of job related knowledge, skills and commensurate experience.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
In an effort to attract, retain, develop and promote the most qualified individuals, CoinDesk is committed to treating all applicants and employees in a nondiscriminatory manner with respect to the terms and conditions of employment, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status/service, physical or mental disability, or any other classification protected by applicable law. This mandate governs all aspects of employment, including recruitment, selection, promotion, training, education, social and recreation programs, compensation, discipline, termination and access to benefits.
ACCOMMODATION
CoinDesk is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the application process, please send an e-mail to recruiting@coindesk.comand let us know the nature of your request.
