AI Builder, Distinguished Engineer

26WD97816

Position Overview

This is a role for an experienced engineer who wants to fundamentally change how systems work. You will join a small, AI-native disrupt squad within Autodesk’s Platform Services & Emerging Technologies (PSET) organization, accountable for redefining how the platform is experienced, accessed, and built upon.

You won’t be handed well-defined problems. You will identify high-leverage opportunities, define what should exist, and prove a dramatically better way through working systems, using internal or external approaches.

Your role is not just to make ideas real, but to determine where to focus and what matters most, building proof points that are viable, scalable, and capable of reshaping the platform.

This team does not operate in traditional roles. As an AI Builder, you bring product thinking, experience design, and engineering together in one motion, shaping workflows end-to-end. You use AI, real systems, and rapid experimentation to reshape how work gets done and to determine which approaches truly deliver the best outcomes.

Your focus is not on operating production systems. You are accountable for turning friction into opportunity and delivering near-production-grade proofs that make a new approach credible and hard to dismiss, shaping platform direction through those outcomes.

Core Traits

To succeed in this role, we are looking for people who are:

• Proof-obsessed: build to test and demonstrate, not to discuss

• Institutionally impatient: do not accept friction or complexity as fixed

• Step-change oriented: identify and pursue fundamentally better ways of working, rejecting incremental improvements that do not materially change outcomes  

• Systems thinkers: naturally connect workflows across boundaries

• Integrators: collapse product, strategy, experience, and engineering

• Highly autonomous: define direction and drive work forward without predefined scope

Responsibilities

• Identify and work through seams and bottlenecks across platform workflows, focusing on the highest-leverage opportunities where a different approach creates outsized impact across the platform

• Define and build end-to-end, AI-native workflow proofs that turn fragmented systems into functioning, real-world workflows

• Build production-like implementations that prove what works in practice, not just in concept

• Use the right combination of tools, agents, and integrations to demonstrate materially better ways of working

• Test and compare approaches in real workflows, challenging whether existing capabilities should be replaced, simplified, or rethought

• Create undeniable proof points for AI-native workflows that expose gaps, challenge assumptions, and shape platform priorities and roadmap decisions across teams

• Translate successful approaches into reusable patterns that can be adopted and scaled by other teams

• Ensure high-impact approaches propagate across the platform, influencing what gets built, prioritized, or deprioritized

• Bring perspective on how best-in-class SaaS platforms expose capabilities to internal and external builders

• Evaluate trade-offs and risks when using external or non-standard solutions, ensuring new approaches can scale responsibly within evolving constraints

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, with demonstrated accountability for technical direction and outcomes across multiple teams or platform areas

• Strong system and architectural judgment across services, data, and workflows

• Strong applied AI capability (structuring problems for agents, orchestrating tools and workflows, evaluating outputs)

• Strong product and workflow judgment with a focus on leverage and outcomes

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to build end-to-end systems across the stack

• Experience operating in both startup and enterprise contexts, with demonstrated ability to adapt pace and approach accordingly

• Proven ability to independently define where to focus, identify high-leverage problems, and drive them from ambiguity to working systems

• Demonstrated ability to deliver cross-team or organizational impact, not just local features

• Strong influence with senior stakeholders and ability to translate proof into direction

Preferred Experience

• Experience working on AI-enabled systems or workflows in real-world environments

• Hands-on experience building or orchestrating agent-based systems and tool integrations

• Experience comparing multiple approaches to determine what actually works in practice

• Experience working across SaaS platform business models, including familiarity with how platform economics and product adoption dynamics interact

• Experience creating reusable patterns that influence how multiple teams build

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Benefits

From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work. Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting https://benefits.autodesk.com/

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $196,000 and $352,110. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Equal Employment Opportunity

At Autodesk, we're building a diverse workplace and an inclusive culture to give more people the chance to imagine, design, and make a better world. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

Diversity & Belonging

We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here: https://www.autodesk.com/company/diversity-and-belonging

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