Principal Engineer

About

Equifax is seeking a visionary Principal Engineer to lead the transformation of our software development lifecycle (SDLC) by orchestrating and extending the capabilities of GitHub Copilot. You will own the creation of a highly leveraged engineering organization where Copilot acts as an autonomous agent handling code generation, testing, incident response, and documentation within a secure, observable framework. This role requires being in the office three days per week (Tuesday – Thursday).

Responsibilities

• Define the strategic roadmap for the GitHub Copilot platform, treating it as a first‑class internal product and architecting the system for invocation, context retrieval, and action execution using custom tools.
• Design and manage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolset to enable Copilot’s interaction with third‑party services such as ServiceNow, Atlassian, DataDog, and GCP.
• Engineer a scalable context‑provision strategy for Copilot, translating internal engineering standards into a version‑controlled repository of custom instructions and integrating vendor‑provided connectors.
• Design, test, and refine complex prompts and contextual data frameworks to maximize coding agent accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.
• Define and monitor KPIs for the agentic system’s effectiveness and implement an observability stack to track Copilot interactions for continuous optimization.
• Establish the platform’s security posture by implementing safeguards for custom tools and APIs, and design a “human‑in‑the‑loop” framework for critical actions.
• Define and enforce granular, code‑driven permissions (RBAC) for custom GitHub Actions and APIs that Copilot can invoke, ensuring the principle of least privilege.
• Demonstrate deep understanding of cloud‑native, distributed micro‑service architectures.
• Deliver solutions for complex business problems through standard SDLC practices.
• Build strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including product, business, and sales partners.
• Communicate complex problems clearly while also diving deep when needed.
• Build and manage technical teams that deliver scalable software solutions.
• Provide deep troubleshooting skills and lead resolution of production and customer issues under pressure.
• Leverage full‑stack development experience and public‑cloud expertise (GCP, AWS).
• Mentor, coach, and develop junior and peer engineers.
• Lead with a data/metrics‑driven mindset focused on optimizing efficient solutions.
• Ensure compliance with Equifax secure software development guidelines and maintain QE, DevSec, and FinOps KPIs.
• Define, maintain, and report SLA, SLO, and SLI metrics in partnership with product, engineering, and architecture teams.
• Collaborate with architects, SRE leads, and technical leadership on strategic direction, guidelines, and best practices.
• Drive up‑to‑date technical documentation, including support, end‑user docs, and runbooks.
• Make implementation architecture decisions for product features, refactoring work, and EOSL decisions.
• Create and deliver technical presentations to internal and external technical and non‑technical stakeholders, communicating with clarity and precision.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience.
• 7+ years of experience writing, debugging, and troubleshooting code in Java, SpringBoot, TypeScript/JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
• 7+ years of experience designing and developing cloud‑native solutions.
• 7+ years of experience designing and developing microservices using Java, SpringBoot, GCP SDKs, and GKE/Kubernetes.
• 3+ years of GitHub Copilot experience, preferably at an expert level.
• 3–5+ years of hands‑on experience building and architecting intelligent agent systems or platforms that integrate with LLMs.
• Hands‑on experience deploying and releasing software using GitHub Actions, Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, and understanding of infrastructure‑as‑code concepts, Helm charts, and Terraform.

Preferred Qualifications

• GitHub Ecosystem Mastery: Deep expertise with the full GitHub platform, including Actions, Apps, webhooks, and REST/GraphQL APIs.
• Software Engineering Excellence: Senior‑level proficiency in Python, Go, or Node.js with strong software architecture and scalable service design skills.
• API and Integration Mastery: Proven experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and securely integrating disparate SaaS systems; familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a strong requirement.
• Cloud‑Native Proficiency: Deep knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, and IAM.
• Systems Thinking: Ability to view the entire SDLC as an interconnected system and strategically inject Copilot for maximum leverage.
• Event‑Driven Architecture: Experience building systems that react to events, especially GitHub webhook events.
• Applied LLM Expertise: Hands‑on experience building applications that integrate with Large Language Models (LLMs) with a focus on practical application.
• Tool‑Use and Function‑Calling Paradigm: Deep understanding of building and exposing “tools” (APIs, functions, custom actions) for an LLM agent to consume.
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) Expert: Practical knowledge of designing, implementing, and optimizing RAG systems.
• Pragmatic Agent Orchestration: Ability to orchestrate workflows around a pre‑existing, powerful agent like Copilot.