URBN Principal Engineer, Developer Experience & AI Enablement

URBN is looking for a Principal Engineer to work across our technology organization on two connected problems: making developers more effective at building software at URBN, and helping teams adopt AI tools and practices that change what’s possible in their work.

This is an individual contributor role, you will not manage a team. Instead, you will work alongside engineering, product, data, and infrastructure teams across the entire organization — listening to how they work, understanding their pain points, and collaborating with them to improve the experience of building and shipping software here.

The right person for this role is someone whose technical depth earns credibility with senior engineers, but whose real impact comes from how they listen, teach, and help teams get better. You care as much about how a team feels about their tools and processes as you do about the tools themselves.

What You Will Find Here

• A technology organization that builds things that matter for brands people care about.
• A Leadership Team who believes their job is to ask "how can I help?" and means it.
• Teams already doing interesting work with AI — including live agent-assisted design workflows — that you will build on, not start from scratch.
• An existing AI methodology and framework for organizational intelligence that you will help extend and take in new directions.
• A culture that is warm, direct, and creatively driven.

Responsibilities:

Developer Experience

• Partner with engineering teams across the organization to understand their end-to-end workflows: local development, CI/CD, testing, deployment, observability, and documentation.
• Collaboratively identify high-friction areas and work with teams to address them — through tooling, process improvements, shared accelerators, or just getting the right people in a room.
• Establish measurement practices with teams to track developer experience improvements meaningfully.
• As needed, develop solutions to improve DevEx

AI Enablement

• Work with teams across the org to identify where AI-assisted development can measurably improve their work: code generation, testing, documentation, review, and beyond.
• Design and deliver hands-on upskilling programs tailored to different roles and teams. Meet people where they are.
• Contribute to URBN’s existing AI agent methodology and organizational intelligence proof of concept, building on work already underway.
• Collaborate with security leadership to develop practical guidance on responsible AI use in an enterprise retail context.
• As needed, develop solutions to improve AI Enablement

Qualifications:

Required

• 8 years in software engineering, developer experience, or platform engineering, with demonstrated influence beyond your immediate team.
• Technical depth in web application stacks (Python/Go/Node/mongoDB/elastic), Enterprise data and analytics platforms, and cloud-native architectures.
• Track record of improving developer experience or velocity at a company with 100 engineers.
• Exceptional interpersonal skills. This role works across the entire technology org without direct authority. You build trust through credibility and collaboration.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You will present to senior leadership and sit with a team of three engineers working through a deployment pipeline. Both require the same clarity.

Preferred

• Experience in retail, ecommerce, or multi-brand consumer companies.
• Hands-on experience building with AI/ML tools, LLMs, or agent-based systems.
• Experience with Snowflake, Qlik, BigQuery, Salesforce or similar technologies.
• A public or community-facing track record: writing, speaking, open source, or internal advocacy.
• Familiarity with enterprise integration patterns: messaging middleware, ERP, warehouse management, or order management systems.