Principal Engineer

About the role

Rubrik is the Security and AI Operations Company. As we move from protecting data to securing and accelerating our customers' AI transformation, we are rethinking how the whole company works and fully embracing AI in everything we do.

The Principal Engineer is a strategic, hands-on role at the same level as an Engineering Director. You will define and execute the technical strategy for Rubrik's AI software factory, the platform on which agents and people take an idea all the way to customer value.

To get there, we are moving from an AI-assisted Software Development Lifecycle to an AI Product Development Lifecycle (AI-PDLC), which covers every stage, not just code. Agents do the synthesis, drafting and execution, while people provide judgment and give accountable approval at every key decision. The platform is at an early stage, and you will lead the build of the shared foundation that every function at Rubrik, from Product, Design and Engineering to Sales and Marketing, will use it for its AI workflows.

Your primary focus is problem seeking: finding where AI can make the biggest difference, from building products to serving customers, and making the case to fund it.

What you'll do

Platform strategy

• Define the technical vision for the AI-PDLC platform: orchestration, approval gates, model and tool gateways, agent runtimes, context, evals and cost visibility.
• Make the platform usable by every function through clear contracts, paved paths and self-serve tooling.
• Decide what Rubrik should own, build on and borrow.
• Turn business opportunities and productivity gaps across Product, Design, Engineering, Support and go-to-market teams into multi-quarter roadmaps.

Technical leadership and standards

• Set the standards for trustworthy agentic workflows: a person approves every agent output, and no workflow skips its quality or security checkpoints.
• Champion eval-driven development, managed agent identities with native access control, and outcome metrics such as landed rate, revert rate and cost per landed change.
• Own cross-cutting initiatives (up to about 18 engineers' effort) end to end. Stay hands-on: prototype, write code and review critical changes.

Influence and growth

• Build consensus across Engineering, Product, Design, Support, Security and business functions.
• Lead the organizational change that AI-native work requires, where ownership means accountability rather than gatekeeping.
• Coach Engineers toward Principal-level impact, raise the hiring bar, and represent Rubrik externally.

About you

• Typically 15+ years in software engineering, with a significant focus on developer or internal platforms.
• Proven at Director-level scope, driving technical strategy across multiple complex systems and organizations.
• Hands-on experience running LLMs and agents in production, including orchestration, tool integration (for example, MCP), context engineering, evals and guardrails.
• Deep expertise in a general-purpose language (for example, Go, Java, C/C++, Scala or Python) and strong first-principles thinking.
• Experience scaling secure, highly available platforms, including identity, access control and cost governance.
• Data-driven: defines outcome metrics and uses them to steer investment and prove impact.
• A consensus builder and coach who communicates clearly with executives, non-technical stakeholders and global teams.