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Principal Engineer - AI Systems
Principal Engineer - AI SystemsAquent Talent • San Bruno, CA, United States
Principal Engineer - AI Systems

Principal Engineer - AI Systems

Aquent Talent • San Bruno, CA, United States
1 day ago
Job type
  • Full-time
Job description

As a Principal Engineer, AI Systems in the Design Organization, you will :

  • Implement and Productionize AI Systems : Partner with design, product, and engineering leaders to translate the AI roadmap into scalable, secure, and resilient solutions that meet the needs of the Design Organization.
  • Drive AI Innovation : Identify and deliver high-impact opportunities where generative AI, LLMs, and intelligent automation can enhance creative workflows, product discovery, design quality, and speed.
  • Build and Scale Production Services : Develop reliable backend services in Python and Node.js, focusing on performance, resilience, and observability. Harden prototypes into production-ready, secure, and scalable services within approved infrastructure and guardrails.
  • Ensure seamless integration with identity, networking, data platforms, observability, and compliance controls (e.g., SSO, secrets management, service mesh).
  • Define Production-Readiness : Establish gates for POCs, including SLA / SLO targets, error budgets, performance baselines, cost limits, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and runbooks.
  • Operational Excellence : Drive CI / CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and migration of prototypes to dev, stage, and prod environments. Ensure operational ownership with alerting, on-call strategies, incident response, and continuous improvement.
  • Architect AI-Powered Design Tools : Lead the technical design and architecture of internal tools and subsystems that empower designers, researchers, and content strategists. Build scalable, reusable infrastructure for organization-wide AI applications.
  • Mentor and Uplift Technical Craft : Guide engineers and architects through complex architecture decisions, rapid prototyping, and AI tool selection. Foster a culture of experimentation, technical excellence, and responsible innovation.
  • Promote AI Thought Leadership : Represent the Design Organization in internal AI communities, share learnings, and influence AI adoption.

What youll bring :

  • Programming : Expert in Python and Node.js for backend services, data pipelines, and AI integration.
  • Kubernetes & Cloud-Native : Deep experience with Kubernetes, Helm / Kustomize, GitOps (Argo CD / Flux), service mesh (Istio / Linkerd), autoscaling, security, and cost optimization.
  • CI / CD & Infrastructure : Proficient with Jenkins (or equivalent), Terraform / CloudFormation, blue-green / canary deployments, feature flags, automated testing, and rollback strategies.
  • Data & Storage : Strong experience with SQL (Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch) databases, including schema design, optimization, and scaling. Familiarity with vector databases and embedding stores.
  • APIs & Integration : Skilled in REST and GraphQL, secure service-to-service authentication, rate limiting, quotas, and event streaming (Kafka / Pub / Sub).
  • Observability : Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, tracing, metrics, log aggregation, SLOs, error budgets, and incident response.
  • Minimum Qualifications :

  • 12+ years in software or platform engineering, delivering production systems at scale
  • 7+ years combined professional experience in Python and Node.js (minimum 4+ years in each)
  • 4+ years operating workloads in Kubernetes in production
  • 5+ years designing and operating both SQL and NoSQL data models
  • 2+ years building or operating ML / LLM-powered applications in production
  • 5+ years leading cross-functional architecture and mentoring senior engineers
  • Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
  • Strong communication skills and a portfolio of shipped systems with measurable impact
  • #app

    #LI-MS3

    #LI-Onsite

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    Principal Engineer Ai • San Bruno, CA, United States

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