Principal Software Engineer - Contract AI

Job ID: 110887 Atlanta Boston Chicago Dallas Washington DC

Do you want to do work that matters, alongside supportive leaders who will help you grow faster than you ever thought possible? Are you a creative problem-solver who is energized by challenges? You’ve come to the right place.

YOUR IMPACT

You will own extraction and evaluation architecture, design and evolve the multi-stage AI pipeline that converts unstructured contracts and invoices into structured compliance findings —covering document ingestion, vision LLM extraction, clause parsing, normalization, and deterministic evaluation logic.

You are the deepest individual technical contributor on the Contract AI platform. You own the hardest engineering problems — extraction model architecture, compliance evaluation logic, pipeline performance at scale, and the agentic reasoning layer. You are not primarily a manager, but you raise the ceiling of what the team can build: through architecture, code, code review, and mentoring.

You'll lead GenAI and agentic engineering, build, tune, and productionize agentic workflows for contract analysis using LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent frameworks. You will advance the platform's reasoning capabilities beyond single-shot prompting into multi-step, tool-using AI agents.

You will set the technical bar for the team: own code quality, architecture reviews, and technical standards. You will be the go-to resource for the hardest debugging, design, and performance challenges.

You'll also mentor Senior Software Engineers, drive accuracy at scale, own evaluation accuracy metrics across compliance case categories; design validation harnesses, prompt refinement workflows, and confidence scoring frameworks.

You will contribute across the stack, write Python and C# in production; contribute to the React/TypeScript analytics dashboard when needed; and own end-to-end delivery of major platform features from design through deployment.

You'll accelerate client deployments, build reusable extractor and evaluator templates that reduce Proof-of-Value configuration time; document architectural patterns for delivery engineers to apply consistently across client environments. You'll stay at the frontier: continuously evaluate emerging agentic frameworks, multi-modal models, and document-understanding approaches; propose and prototype high-value capabilities before they appear in competitors' roadmaps.

YOUR GROWTH

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.

YOUR QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS

8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong portfolio of production systems you architected and shipped

Expert-level Python—application development, async patterns, type-checking, testing frameworks (pytest), performance profiling

Production experience with Generative AI: Azure OpenAI, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, RAG architectures, embeddings, structured output extraction, evaluation harnesses

Strong C#/.NET—OOP design, .NET Core / .NET 8, REST APIs, background services is required

Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks in shipped production systems —LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalents is required

Azure platform depth: AKS, Azure Functions, CosmosDB, Postgres, Azure OpenAI, Azure DevOps, Terraform. Distributed system design: microservices, event-driven architecture, API design, multi-tenant data isolation, observability

Enterprise engineering discipline: TDD, CI/CD, RBAC/IAM, secure coding, SQL performance tuning

TypeScript/React production experience for full-stack coverage

Document understanding: vision LLMs (GPT-4o Vision), OCR, multi-modal extraction pipelines from PDF/DOCX

Familiarity with contract management, procurement, or invoice processing domains

Experience contributing to or consuming open-source AI frameworks

Ability to communicate architecture decisions in writing and in technical reviews; comfort with client-facing technical interaction

Please review the additional requirements regarding essential job functions of McKinsey colleagues. Our unwavering commitment to integrity drives everything we do, guiding us to always act in the best interests of our clients, our people, and the communities we serve.