Principal Cloud Engineer - AI Platform

Compensation: $175,000-$250,000 per year
Location: United States – Remote or Omaha, NE - Hybrid

The job: 

As a Principal Cloud Engineer, AI Platform at Buildertrend, you’ll shape the cloud foundation that allows AI agents to support real customer workflows while protecting data, controlling costs and maintaining performance. You’ll own critical platform architecture, establish standards that help engineering teams move independently and make the technical decisions that determine how safely we scale AI across our products. AI agents are already changing how work gets done, and the infrastructure behind them determines whether that change is secure, reliable and sustainable. Your work will help builders and remodelers spend less time managing processes and more time growing their businesses.

What you will do: 

• Design and maintain the infrastructure behind production AI agents, including workload identity, ingress and egress gateways, network isolation and platform-level sensitive data redaction.
• Lead decisions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) networking, private connectivity, zero-trust egress and service perimeters to protect workloads without limiting the platform’s ability to grow.
• Develop reusable Terraform modules and CI/CD pipelines that help product teams deploy safely and independently, including temporary environments for validating changes before merge.
• Establish a centralized, approved path for large language models (LLM) access, including routing, virtual keys, provider onboarding, observability and cost attribution.
• Document platform and vendor decisions with total cost of ownership, barriers to entry, trade-offs and open questions clearly defined so teams can make informed decisions and build on a consistent foundation.
• Serve as a technical counterpart to major cloud and AI providers, escalate complex issues and validate roadmap commitments before they influence platform architecture.
• Take incident command during critical production issues, make informed go/no-go decisions under pressure and communicate risks and status clearly to technical leaders and executives.
• Implement safeguards for credentials, secrets and AI usage, including automated secrets rotation and policy-as-code controls that reduce the risk of unauthorized AI deployments.
• Lead blameless postmortems, identify systemic weaknesses and turn incident findings into measurable improvements in platform security, resilience and operational readiness.
• Embrace using AI as a tool to enhance your work, while remaining open to learning, applying critical thinking, and owning the quality of your final work.

Who you are and what you need: 

• 10+ years of experience architecting enterprise-grade GCP environments, with advanced knowledge of GCP-native networking, including VPC Service Controls and Private Service Connect, as well as IAM perimeters and Workload Identity.
• Previous experience at a B2B SaaS company.
• Strong infrastructure as code practice.
• Hands-on experience running AI or ML workloads in production, such as model serving, agent runtimes or inference gateways, and understand how their needs differ from traditional web applications.
• Practical depth in workload identity and machine-to-machine authorization, including service accounts, short-lived credentials, certificate-based identity, and token delegation, and the challenges of on-behalf-of authorization flows.
• Track record-owning production incidents, including calling deployments under pressure and updating executives during an outage.
• Experience with agent development frameworks, agent runtime platforms and the emerging tooling around them.
• Approach incidents without blame, communicate directly, take ownership of platform outcomes and turn lessons learned into practical improvements that help other engineers deliver reliable software.
• Experience with automated secrets rotation, policy as code and governance that limits unauthorized “Shadow AI” deployments, with an eye on the new attack surfaces AI creates.

We are giving you:                                                                       

• Exceptional health packages, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus life insurance and short- and long-term disability benefits
• A 401(k) plan with Buildertrend matching contributions to help you plan for the future
• Generous paid time off, 11 paid holidays, plus personal days to make sure you have time to recharge
• Parental leave and paid sabbaticals to support you during life’s big moments
• Volunteer time off – because giving back matters
  Wellness program and onsite fitness center to keep you feeling your best
• Opportunities for hybrid or remote work to give you the flexibility you need
• Technology reimbursement to help cover costs for the tech you need to do your job from home
• Free daily lunches when you're at our HQ office, plus monthly events to connect with your team

Who we are: 

Great builders don’t just manage projects – they run successful businesses. That’s where Buildertrend comes in. As the leading residential construction management platform, we give contractors the power to control their financials, schedules, team workflows and client relationships – all in one system. No more juggling disconnected tools or guessing on profitability. With nearly two decades of industry expertise, Buildertrend helps builders work smarter, scale faster and stay ahead of the competition. If you want to learn more about us, check out: https://buildertrend.com/about/

Working at Buildertrend: 

At Buildertrend, we fully recognize that we all work so we can live better lives—we appreciate and respect that this is a job and not your whole life. What makes Buildertrend so special is a commitment to ensuring you can have the best job, work with the best people, and live your best life outside of work. Our goal is to create a culture where everyone can make an impact on our customers, communities, and each other. In short: We want you to be who you are, love what you do, and build your best life.

Buildertrend Solutions, Inc. is committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and will not discriminate against an applicant or employee based on race, including natural or protective hairstyle, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, sex (including gender, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, childbirth, breastfeeding, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, reproductive decision-making), age, physical or mental disability, veteran or military status, genetic information, citizenship, marital status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. The information collected by this application is solely to determine suitability for employment, verify identity, and maintain employment statistics on applicants.

Applicants with disabilities may be entitled to reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and certain state or local laws. A “reasonable accommodation” is a change in the way things are normally done which will ensure an equal employment opportunity without imposing undue hardship on Buildertrend Solutions, Inc. Please inform the company's personnel representative if you need assistance completing this application or to otherwise participate in the application process. To see the complete list of Essential Job Functions, visit https://buildertrend.com/essential-job-functions-notice/