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Tech Lead / Staff / Principal Engineer - AI-Native Engineering

Location
Seoul, Korea
Employment Type
Full-time
Location Type
On-site
Level
Mid-Senior Level

The opportunity

Our client is a global insurance leader running complex, business-critical systems at enormous scale - and it is rebuilding how engineering works. Its technology organisation is moving to an AI-native model across the entire product lifecycle: from idea and design through development, testing, deployment and operations.

The foundations are already in place: AI-assisted and agentic software engineering, context and harness engineering, agent-based test automation, AI-driven reverse engineering of legacy applications and an AI-native product development lifecycle. Its strongest teams already perform at the level of good teams at major technology companies. The challenge now is scaling that across a global engineering organisation.

Korea is one of the client's most important markets, and it is building a significant senior engineering team here.

The role

The client is hiring at Tech Lead, Staff and Principal level. These are hands-on technical leadership positions for engineers who can shape complex solutions, introduce new ways of working and act as multipliers across delivery teams - not conventional individual-contributor roles, and not traditional line-management roles.

You will work inside real delivery teams on legacy modernisation, systems integration and data-intensive products. At Principal level, you may own the technical direction of a major business domain.

What you'll do

Engineering & solution architecture

  • Lead the technical design and evolution of complex, business-critical enterprise applications

  • Design robust, scalable solution architectures grounded in practical engineering

  • Review application portfolios, legacy architectures and integrations, and find ways to modernise and simplify

  • Translate business requirements, customer journeys and product needs into actionable technology solutions

  • Guide decisions on integration patterns, APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and modern application architectures

AI-native engineering transformation

  • Introduce and embed AI-native software engineering practices within delivery teams

  • Apply agentic AI tooling to development, legacy system understanding, test automation and engineering workflows

  • Use and evaluate context engineering, harness engineering, reverse engineering and autonomous engineering agents

  • Experiment with emerging AI development tools and judge what actually works on enterprise problems

  • Identify barriers to AI adoption and build practical ways to overcome them

Technical leadership & coaching

  • Act as a hands-on mentor, working directly alongside developers to demonstrate better engineering approaches

  • Lead architecture discussions, solution reviews and knowledge-sharing sessions

  • Influence engineering standards and technical decisions without relying on formal line-management authority

  • Help teams become more independent, confident and technically mature

Product & stakeholder collaboration

  • Partner with product leaders, engineering managers, architects and business stakeholders

  • Explain complex technical options so the business can make informed decisions

  • Build credibility with both engineering practitioners and technology leadership

What you bring

  • A strong track record in modern software engineering and delivery of complex systems

  • Practical solution architecture capability - you can explain major architectural decisions and trade-offs in detail

  • Current hands-on credibility through delivery, prototyping, experimentation or substantive technical work

  • Real, applied experience with AI-assisted and agentic software development - with evidence of how it improved workflows, quality or outcomes

  • A product engineering mindset: you connect architecture decisions to customer journeys, business processes and outcomes

  • Demonstrable ability to coach, mentor and upskill other engineers

  • Strong communication and a collaborative, curious, low-ego working style

Formal people-management experience is not required. The client cares about evidence of ability and impact more than years of experience or titles.

Nice to have

  • Insurance technology experience (commercial, claims, life, policy administration or high-net-worth) - an advantage, not a requirement

  • Banking, payments, capital markets or other regulated financial-services engineering

  • Large-scale enterprise modernisation, legacy transformation or complex systems integration

  • Sophisticated consumer digital platforms, e-commerce or high-scale product engineering

  • AI-enabled testing, codebase analysis or developer productivity tooling

  • Professional English (helpful, not mandatory)

What success looks like

  • You build technical credibility quickly within your assigned teams

  • You introduce AI-native approaches with clear, measurable value to delivery

  • Teams get stronger rather than depending on you

  • At Principal level, you take meaningful accountability for the technical direction of a significant domain

Why join

  • Scale: enterprise systems and complex products with global reach

  • Complexity: hard modernisation, integration and architecture problems

  • Impact: visible influence over substantial domains, not a narrow slice of a giant tech org

  • Stability: an established, financially strong employer

  • Purpose: make AI-native engineering a real enterprise operating model, not a pilot

Logistics

  • Location: South Korea

  • Work mode: Fully on-site

  • Level: Tech Lead, Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer

  • Interview process: typically 3-5 stages; senior levels include a live, case-based solution architecture discussion rather than an on-the-spot coding test.

Apply now
Tech Lead / Staff / Principal Engineer - AI-Native Engineering
Apply now