[Hiring] Principal AI Software Engineer @Walker & Dunlop

Role Description

As a Principal AI Software Engineer on our AI Development Team, you will help shape the future of our Loan Origination and Servicing platform and the AI systems that support how we build, deploy, and operate software across the business. You will design scalable applications, intelligent workflows, and agentic systems that deliver real-time insights and improve operational efficiency for our teams and clients.

You will also contribute to Atlas, our AI collaboration platform that powers reusable skills, agents, and AI capabilities across WDTech. This role requires deep technical expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to independently solve complex problems, ship reliable solutions, and raise the engineering bar through your work and mentorship.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own complex AI and platform initiatives end-to-end, delivering business-facing capabilities while strengthening the underlying context and agent platform.
• Design, build and maintain agentic workflows for business-critical processes such as loan intake, document review, and servicing.
• Help establish new platform patterns and capabilities by defining approaches, proving them through production use cases, and scaling them for broader adoption.
• Lead model selection and routing, evaluating models based on cost, latency, and quality, and evolving solutions as new models and capabilities become available.
• Design interfaces and capabilities used by other teams, including MCP tool servers, agent handoffs, subagents, long-running state, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Establish evaluation and reliability practices, including evaluation sets, LLM-as-judge approaches where appropriate, regression testing, and ongoing performance measurement.
• Operate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying risks, making sound technical trade-offs, and escalating when needed, while raising the engineering bar through collaboration and mentorship.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software development experience, including experience as a senior individual contributor delivering production systems.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Extensive experience delivering production AI/ML systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows.
• Deep experience with modern agent frameworks and SDKs, such as Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, and Pydantic AI, as well as MCP and A2A.
• Experience with prompt and context engineering, including RAG, embeddings, hybrid search, and reranking.
• Experience with model evaluation, observability, and guardrails for production AI systems.
• Experience using agentic development tools, including skills, subagents, and harness configurations.
• Experience in Real Estate, Financial Services, or Capital Markets preferred.

Requirements

• Deep proficiency in Python and modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI, with a strong focus on scalable and maintainable architecture.
• Strong expertise with SQL databases, including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning.
• Experience testing non-deterministic systems, including LLM call fixtures, evaluation suites, and strategies for controlling flaky behavior.
• Strong judgment in determining which capabilities belong within a shared platform versus individual applications.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, establish emerging patterns, and independently move from business problem definition through solution delivery.
• Experience with Event Sourcing and Domain-Driven Design principles.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to show ownership of your work, take on challenges and acknowledge growth opportunities, and demonstrate patience when learning new processes.
• Courtesy, respect, and thoughtfulness in teaming with colleagues and other stakeholders.

Benefits

• The opportunity to join one of Fortune Magazine’s Great Places to Work winners.
• Comprehensive benefit options that have earned Walker & Dunlop the gold level of the 2025 Cigna Healthy Workforce Designation™, some of which include:
• Up to 83% subsidized medical payroll deductions.
• Competitive dental and vision benefits.
• 401(k) + match.
• Pre-tax transit and commuting benefits.
• A robust health and wellness program – earn cash rewards and gain access to resources that promote health, engagement, and balance.
• Paid maternity and parental leave, as well as other family paid leave programs.
• Company-paid life, short and long-term disability insurance.
• Health Savings Account and Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending.
• Career development opportunities.
• Empowerment and encouragement to give back – volunteer hours and donation matching.