About the role
Company Overview Mainspring Energy is revolutionizing power generation with the world’s most flexible and adaptable local power generation technology, the Mainspring Linear Generator. Commercial, industrial, and utility leaders are choosing Mainspring over traditional options like engines, turbines, and fuel cells to quickly and reliably deliver local power for EV charging, commercial facilities, data centers, and grid-scale operations. The Mainspring Linear Generator is fuel flexible, ramps up and down to meet demand, and utilizes a flameless reaction with near-zero NOx emissions. Backed by top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, American Electric Power, Lightrock, and General Catalyst Mainspring designs, manufactures and delivers its products to customers across the U.S. today, and we’re quickly scaling for international expansion. Inspired by our vision of the affordable, reliable, net-zero carbon grid, Mainspring is rapidly expanding within the $816B global electricity equipment market, and we’re hiring the best talent to meet growing customer demand around the globe. We welcome a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and talents to bring fresh perspectives and ongoing innovation to our customers. We are looking to build relationships with people who share our values: Pragmatic Optimism. Building a new category of world-class power generation requires the optimism of ambition and creativity, balanced with practicality to solve problems efficiently. The challenges that arise are opportunities for growth. Excellence without Ego. We bring expertise and commitment to creating the best customer experience, from sales to deployment and service, just as we apply deep technical rigor to building and delivering world-class products. We strive for excellence and behave as leaders with the humility to acknowledge our challenges, both collectively and as individual contributors. Proactive Collaboration. The integration and cross-disciplinary nature of Mainspring’s business requires intentionally seeking out others who bring different skills, perspectives, and priorities. Our culture of inclusion and respect extends beyond our team to interactions with our partners and customers. More information can be found at www.mainspringenergy.com Job Overview Mainspring Energy is evolving beyond using AI for simple productivity gains. We are seeking a Principal AI Architect to lead our transition into an organization where AI agents are fully embedded in our engineering development cycles. This is a strategic leadership role focused on architecting the future of how we build linear generator technology. At the principal level, you will not just support existing processes; you will define the AI strategy for engineering development workflows, ensuring that AI-driven automation has clear structure, rigorous guardrails, and measurable Return on Investment (ROI). \n What You’ll Do AI Strategy for Engineering Workflows Architect Embedded Agent Cycles: Transition Mainspring from "AI-assisted" tasks to a model where autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents are natively integrated into the engineering lifecycle—from code generation and hardware simulation to automated testing and documentation Workflow Optimization: Identify and re-engineer high-impact engineering bottlenecks, deploying AI agents that act as functional members of the development team ROI & Performance Measurement: Establish a data-driven framework to measure the impact of AI on engineering velocity, error reduction, and resource optimization. You will be responsible for defining and reporting on clear ROI metrics for all AI initiatives Governance, Guardrails, and Security Standardized Guardrails: Design and implement automated guardrails within the CI/CD pipeline to ensure AI-generated output meets Mainspring’s rigorous safety, security, and quality standards Responsible Agent Execution: Establish governance frameworks for agentic behavior, including "human-in-the-loop" checkpoints, audit logs, and access controls to prevent drift or unauthorized actions in production environments Model Evaluation: Build rigorous benchmarking systems to evaluate model reliability and cost-effectiveness, ensuring a lean and high-performing AI stack Technical Leadership & Infrastructure Agentic Infrastructure: Design the end-to-end infrastructure required to support multi-agent systems, including orchestration layers, long-term memory (Vector DBs), and tool-use capabilities (RAG) Build vs. Buy Strategy: Act as the technical authority on whether to leverage third-party AI platforms or develop proprietary agentic tools tailored to our specific hardware-software engineering needs What You Bring 12+ years of experience in software engineering or ML infrastructure, with a proven track record of moving AI beyond "chatbots" and into functional, automated workflows Deep Expertise in Agentic Frameworks: Proven track record in building autonomous systems using the Gemini and Anthropic SDKs (specifically via Vertex AI ). Expert-level proficiency in architecting agentic design patterns—including MCP (Model Context Protocol) , multi-agent orchestration, and complex state management—within high-scale production environments Strategic ROI Focus: Ability to bridge the gap between technical execution and business value, with experience presenting ROI cases to executive leadership Security & Compliance Mindset: Expertise in building "safe-by-design" systems, specifically regarding data privacy and preventing model hallucinations in mission-critical engineering tasks What Principal Level Means at Mainspring At principal level, you are the architect of the strategy, not just the executor. You are expected to define the technical roadmap that transforms our engineering culture, acting as a multiplier who elevates the entire organization's capability through AI. \n $227,500 - $280,000 a year This position is open to both onsite and remote candidates . The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee. Along with the base salary, Mainspring offers pre-IPO stock options +