Principal Software Engineer
About this opportunity
Career Category
Manufacturing
Job Description
Join Amgen's Mission to Serve Patients
If you feel like you’re part of something bigger, it’s because you are. At Amgen, our shared mission, to serve patients, drives all that we do. It is key to our becoming one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies. We are global collaborators who achieve together, researching, manufacturing, and delivering ever-better products that reach over 10 million patients worldwide. It’s time for a career you can be proud of.
Principal Software Engineer
Live
What you will do
We are developing Manufacturing and Engineering AI tools that help employees gain insights, access knowledge, and make better decisions more efficiently. The Principal Software Engineer will set the technical direction and lead architecture for platform initiatives supporting chatbots, agents, and AI-enabled workflows across manufacturing and engineering use cases.
This role requires deep manufacturing technology fluency and hands-on experience with the platform stack behind industrial and enterprise AI solutions. You will guide architecture and standards for systems that integrate with manufacturing data sources, operational platforms, and modern GenAI services, while supporting both low/no-code and pro-code development patterns.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will define architecture, evaluate build-versus-buy options, own reliability and cost characteristics, and lead a team of engineers working with product owners and principal engineers to evolve and operate these platforms.
Win
What we expect of you
Define the technical vision and reference architecture for AI platforms supporting chatbots, agents, orchestration, and related enterprise services.
Translate product and business requirements into scalable platform capabilities, including agent hosting, model access, AI gateways, observability, and operational tooling.
Drive platform decisions around LLM serving, model endpoints, caching, batching, latency-versus-cost tradeoffs , and multi-model support.
Lead architecture for manufacturing integrations and industrial data connectivity, including patterns for SCADA, Data Historian, MES, ERP, LIMS, APIs, event streams, and document-based knowledge sources.
Own platform reliability, scalability, and cost by defining SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, cost attribution, and FinOps practices.
Collaborate with Product Owners, Principal Engineers, and stakeholders to define roadmap, acceptance criteria, and delivery milestones.
Lead and mentor engineers delivering platform services, integrations, CI/CD for agents and models, and marketplace/ catalog capabilities.
Establish standards for security, compliance, and model governance, including data handling, access controls, logging, auditability, and traceability.
Be hands-on when needed to prototype architectures, review designs, troubleshoot production incidents, and participate in code and design reviews.
Technology and domain experience
The ideal candidate will bring direct experience with manufacturing or industrial technology environments, along with strong fluency in modern AI and data platforms. Experience in one or more of the following areas is strongly preferred:
Manufacturing systems and industrial data sources such as SCADA, Data Historian, MES, ERP, and LIMS.
Cloud and data platforms including AWS, Databricks, Apache Spark, PySpark , Scala, Python, and SQL.
Real-time and event-driven integration using Apache Kafka, Debezium , or similar streaming technologies.
GenAI and MLOps capabilities such as MLflow , model serving, experiment tracking, prompt management, deployment automation, and governance.
AI application frameworks and orchestration tools such as LangChain , LangGraph , LlamaIndex , DSPy , Amazon Bedrock, and OpenAI APIs.
Knowledge retrieval patterns including RAG, embeddings, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and metadata-driven search.
Production engineering practices including Kubernetes, containers, microservices, API gateway patterns, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability.
Agile/ SAFe delivery using JIRA, Confluence, and DevOps tooling.
Basic Qualifications:
Master's / Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science , Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
13-17 years of engineering experience building or platforming cloud services or developer platforms, with 3+ years leading engineering teams or technical programs.
Proven experience designing and operating cloud-native platforms using Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and related distributed system patterns.
Hands-on experience with LLM serving or adjacent model-serving patterns, including inference endpoints, routing, scaling, batching, and latency/cost optimization.
Practical knowledge of API gateway patterns, authentication and authorization, and secure integrations.
Familiarity with cost attribution and FinOps concepts for cloud and AI workloads.
Strong track record partnering with product managers and senior technical stakeholders to deliver platform capabilities and roadmaps.
Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Experience with observability and SRE practices, including metrics, tracing, logging, incident management, and production support.
Preferred Qualifications:
Direct experience with manufacturing applications, industrial data platforms, or regulated manufacturing environments.
Experience with agentic AI platforms, agent hosting frameworks, and workflow orchestration tools.
Familiarity with the broader LLM ecosystem, including model providers, orchestration libraries, and governance frameworks.
Experience implementing AI gateways, centralized model access controls, policy layers, or audit systems.
Experience with FinOps tooling and cost-allocation models for platform services.
Experience shipping developer experience capabilities such as SDKs, CLIs, templates, and documentation.
Soft Skills:
Excellent analytical and troubleshooting skills.
Strong verbal and written communication skills
Ability to work effectively with global, virtual teams
High degree of initiative and self-motivation.
Ability to handle multiple priorities successfully.
Team-oriented, with a focus on achieving team goals
Strong presentation and public speaking skills.
Thrive
What you can expect of us
As we work to develop treatments that take care of others, we also work to care for our teammates’ professional and personal growth and well-being.
In addition to the base salary, Amgen offers competitive and comprehensive Total Rewards Plans that are aligned with local industry standards.
Apply now
for a career that defies imagination
In our quest to serve patients above all else , Amgen is the first to imagine, and the last to doubt. Join us.
careers.amgen.com
Amgen is an Equal Opportunity employer and will consider you without regard to your race, color , religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability status.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request an accommodation.
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Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Information Technology role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 367 comparable Principal Information Technology roles across 36 biopharma companies.
Salary context
46 of 367 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 367 comparable roles
+ 14 more countries
Seniority mix
367 of 367 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
1 of 367 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.