Principal AI Engineer

Who We Are: We’re a high-growth software company with a big mission : empowering K-12 district teams to do more with less.  At LINQ, we get K12. That’s why we help districts transform K-12 school operations with best-in-class, cloud-based software solutions built to help districts return more resources to classrooms. Integrating finance, HR, nutrition management, and payments into a single, secure platform, LINQ reduces administrative burden. LINQ is trusted by 30% of school districts across the U.S. to help them operate more efficiently and serve over 1 billion meals to 17 million students annually, process payroll for 364,000 educators, administrators, and staff, and engage with millions of families through the free LINQ Connect app.      Our team? They’re talented, committed, and fiercely loyal problem-solvers. At LINQ, you’ll find challenging and meaningful work, a team that respects and uplifts one another, and a commitment to constant improvement. Our customers love us because we’re attentive, patient, communicative, and solutions focused. They know they can count on us to not only anticipate their needs but to deliver the right answer every time.  LINQ’s Values:  • Act with Integrity & Build Trust: Trust is the foundation of our company. We operate with the highest standards of integrity, both internally and externally. We believe in transparency, honesty, and accountability. Building a culture where trust is earned and maintained.  • Deliver Excellence: We consistently exceed our clients’ expectations. In every interaction, we strive to anticipate needs, provide swift solutions, and go the extra mile to relentlessly impress our customers. We communicate clearly, consistently, and in a timely way to cultivate lasting relationships.  • Embrace Challenges: We embrace a growth mindset. Challenges offer opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Continuous learning keeps us relevant and effective to ensure our solutions remain on the leading edge of innovation.  • Collaborate & Act as One Team: Diverse skills, ideas, and perspectives are our strength. Through open communication, shared goals, and a spirit of unity and mutual respect, we collaborate to achieve excellence, drive innovation, and propel our company forward as a cohesive force.  Why This Role Exists   LINQ is building AI into the way we work — not as a layer on top, but as part of how every team operates. We need a builder to lead that work from the inside.  This is an embedded role. You will sit with teams across LINQ — starting with Go-to-Market and Customer Experience — map how they work today, simplify the workflows that slow them down, and ship the agents that take real work off people’s plates. You’ll package what you build as reusable skills the rest of LINQ can adopt, instrument the results, and hand it back. Then you move to the next team.  You will also help define how LINQ’s internal agent platform takes shape — the orchestration patterns, the skills library, and the evaluation discipline that make agent work compound across teams. The patterns you set become how LINQ runs on AI at scale.  This is not a research role, a strategy role, or a program management role. You will be expected to ship things, measure whether they worked, and iterate. You will be the technical substance behind LINQ’s AI transformation; we have leaders who own the strategy and the program ops, and you will partner closely with them. What You’ll  Own   Build the Agents (50%)   Embed with teams across LINQ to learn how the work actually gets done, where the friction lives, and where agents can meaningfully simplify it. The unit of work is real workflows, not novelty demos.   Design and ship multi-step, tool-using agents that take work off people’s plates. Build with the right tools for the job — foundation model APIs, MCP servers, agent frameworks (LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic tool use patterns, or whatever fits the problem). Bias toward production-ready, not demo-ready.   Build durable, not disposable. The agent you ship to CX should leave behind reusable skills the next team can pick up, not a black box that only you understand. Think in primitives and patterns, not scripts.   Take evals and guardrails seriously. You know why a 95%-reliable agent is sometimes worse than a 70%-reliable one with a clear handoff, and you build accordingly.   Instrument what you build. Define the metrics, stand up the dashboards, and prove the impact in time saved, errors avoided, or work that no longer needs doing.   Hand it back. Train the team, document the patterns, and transition ownership to an internal champion or sustaining team so you can move to the next workflow.   First-six-month focus areas: Go-to-Market (sales motion, pipeline hygiene, RFP support) and Customer Experience (support deflection, ticket triage, knowledge management). Other functions follow.   Shape the Platform (20%)   Help define LINQ’s internal agent platform — how agents are built, evaluated, deployed, and observed. Set the patterns that the rest of LINQ’s AI work compounds against.   Establish the skills pattern — how reusable agent capabilities get packaged, versioned, evaluated, and shared across teams. This becomes the unit of leverage across LINQ.   Shape the orchestration approach — how agents discover tools, hand off to each other, escalate to humans, and remain observable when things go wrong. Use existing frameworks where they fit; build only what we genuinely need.   Evaluate and recommend AI tooling: foundation models, agent frameworks, MCP servers, automation platforms, eval and observability tooling. Make clear build-vs-buy-vs-integrate recommendations.   Enable Everyone Else (20%)   Co-launch an internal AI champions network alongside our Senior Director of Operations. You will own the technical substance — agent templates, reusable skills, evaluation harnesses, MCP integrations — t