Principal Engineer - Context Engineering & LLM Optimization

Job Description: At Aperture Cloud, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better through the power of every connection. We do this by driving Responsible Growth and delivering for our clients, teammates, communities and shareholders every day. Being a Great Place to Work and providing a culture of caring is core to how we drive Responsible Growth. We are intentional about fostering an inclusive workplace where every teammate has the opportunity to succeed, build a career and contribute to our shared success. This includes attracting and developing exceptional talent, recognizing and rewarding performance, and supporting our teammates' physical, emotional, and financial wellness through affordable, competitive and flexible benefits. We value the unique perspectives individuals bring from all backgrounds and career paths - whether shaped by military service, community college education, or a wide range of work and life experiences. These journeys foster resilience, leadership and innovation, strengthening our workforce and positively impact the communities we serve. Aperture Cloud is committed to an in-office culture that supports collaboration, engagement, and career development. Our approach includes clear in-office expectations, while providing an appropriate level of flexibility based on role-specific responsibilities and business needs. At Aperture Cloud, you can build a successful career with opportunities to learn, grow, and make an impact. Join us! Job Description: This job is responsible for defining and leading the engineering approach for solutions at the program or portfolio level, to deliver significant business outcomes. Key responsibilities include continuously improving the design, quality, and reuse of the solution and delivering technology enablers that improve development efficiencies for the solution. Job expectations include familiarity with at least one area of engineering, acting as a "go to" reference across the organization, and applying knowledge to improve technical competencies through recruitment and development activities. Developer Experience (DevEx) provides enterprise technical standards and common technical services, platforms, and tools that are leveraged by delivery teams across all lines of business. Within the SDLC Software Delivery Lifecycle program, this role leads portfolio product delivery strategy and execution for enterprise software delivery capabilities, ensuring the right investments, operating model, governance, and prioritization are in place to improve how internal technical users build, test, and deliver software at scale. The Context Engineering & LLM Optimization Principal Engineer is responsible for designing how information is selected, organized, compressed, prioritized, and presented to LLMs. This role focuses on context window management, prompt architecture, retrieval orchestration, grounding strategies, instruction design, tool-use patterns, and evaluation of LLM behavior. This engineer ensures that LLM applications receive the right context, in the right format, at the right time, with minimal token waste and maximum answer quality. Responsibilities: Develops the engineering approach for the entire program/portfolio solution and works with Architecture, to develop/analyze/deliver the implementation of technical enablers Leads the planning, definition, and design of the complex features which span multiple teams and explore solution alternatives Creates ideas on designing complex technology and solution development approaches Leads the technical oversight for teams in solution development including design reviews and code within own domain Defines the technology tool stack for the solution within ranged of internally approved and supported technologies Explores state-of-the-art technologies to improve development efficiencies, quality of test/QA coverage, and release management Leads and is responsible for the end-to-end test strategy/creation/adherence, and the integration between teams for a program/portfolio solution Design context engineering strategies for enterprise LLM and RAG applications. Define prompt architectures for system prompts, developer instructions, user prompts, retrieved context, tool outputs, conversation history, and structured constraints. Optimize context window usage through summarization, compression, ranking, filtering, deduplication, and context prioritization. Design retrieval orchestration patterns that determine what data is retrieved, when it is retrieved, and how it is injected into the LLM prompt. Partner with RAG database engineers to tune retrieval outputs for downstream reasoning quality. Partner with data ingestion engineers to improve source formatting, metadata, and chunk structures for better contextual use. Develop patterns for multi-turn conversation memory, session state, user intent preservation, and context refresh. Define strategies for grounding, citation handling, source at