Principal Product Engineer - Agentic AI

Principal Product Engineer (Agentic AI) - AI-Native Engineering Transformation

UK Remote | Occasional travel to company HQ

£120,000-£160,000

AI Agents, Agentic Workflows, Full-Stack Engineering, Software Architecture

Principal Product Engineer - We're working with an established UK consumer technology business that is embarking on a major AI-driven transformation. They have recently migrated their core products onto a new platform and they're now reimagining how the entire business operates, moving away from traditional project-based delivery towards empowered product teams with AI at the heart of how they build and deliver software.

The Principal Product Engineer (Agentic AI)

This is an organisation-wide technical leadership role, working directly with the CPTO and Head of Engineering to fundamentally change how software is designed, built, tested and delivered.

You'll pioneer an agent-first software development lifecycle, establishing the tools, workflows, context and engineering practices that allow AI agents to take on an increasingly significant proportion of software development. This will involve building and shipping production software using agentic workflows as your default approach, designing the tooling and feedback loops that make agents effective, and introducing the quality controls needed to maintain high engineering standards.

You'll also drive improvements in engineering productivity, delivery speed and software quality, while coaching engineers and Tech Leads across the wider organisation. Working closely with Product and Design, you'll help accelerate the journey from idea to customer value.

This goes well beyond introducing AI coding assistants. You'll be expected to demonstrate how agentic workflows can transform engineering capacity, delivery speed and economics, while maintaining exceptional standards of quality and reliability.

You'll remain highly hands-on, building production software yourself while influencing engineering practices across the organisation.

What will the Principal Product Engineer bring?

• Principal or Staff-level engineering fundamentals and architectural judgement.
• Demonstrable experience using AI agents to deliver significant production software.
• Evidence of materially increasing engineering output through agentic development.
• Strong full-stack engineering and systems design capabilities.
• Experience designing agent workflows, tooling, context and feedback loops.
• The ability to influence engineering practices across multiple teams.
• A strong product mindset, commercial awareness and appetite for experimentation.

Experience building custom agents, skills, MCP integrations or development automation would be particularly interesting.

Why This Opportunity?

This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of engineering within an established business, with the commercial backing and autonomy to make meaningful changes. You'll have direct access to the senior leadership team and the opportunity to establish an entirely new way of building software across the organisation.

The ambition is to move beyond traditional engineering team structures and create an environment where a small number of exceptional engineers, working alongside AI agents, can deliver significantly more than conventional teams.

For an engineer already pushing the boundaries of agentic development who wants to influence an entire engineering organisation, this is a particularly exciting opportunity.

Please reply with your CV or call Simon for a chat.

Principal Product Engineer (Agentic AI) - AI-Native Engineering Transformation

UK Remote | Occasional travel to company HQ

£120,000-£160,000

AI Agents, Agentic Workflows, Full-Stack Engineering, Software Architecture

Burns Sheehan Ltd will consider applications based only on skills and ability and will not discriminate on any grounds.