Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: San Jose, California, United States

Salary: $249,000–$348,500 total cash range; potential top of range up to $398,500 based on sustained performance.

Company

hirify.global is a global travel technology company connecting travelers, partners, and advertisers through consumer brands, B2B services, and travel advertising.

What you will do

• Partner with business-unit leaders, domain experts, end users, and technologists to identify high-value AI opportunities and define measurable outcomes.
• Lead engagements from discovery and use-case framing through technical design, prototyping, production deployment, adoption, measurement, and continuous improvement.
• Design complex AI-enabled systems using system design, API design, data modeling, observability, evaluation, and testing practices.
• Evaluate models, platforms, tools, and architecture patterns for retrieval, orchestration, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop controls, and enterprise integrations.
• Establish reusable AI engineering standards, reference implementations, frameworks, evaluation methods, and enablement materials.
• Coach senior engineers and technical leaders while influencing technical direction across multiple teams and stakeholder groups.

Requirements

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with a bachelor’s degree, 10+ years with a master’s degree, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience owning complex systems, workflows, or platforms integrated with broader enterprise systems.
• Deep expertise in software engineering practices including coding, source control, build processes, testing, operations, system design, APIs, data modeling, and observability.
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, or operating AI-enabled systems, tools, agents, or workflows.
• Experience working directly with business units to clarify ambiguous needs, deliver technical solutions, and drive adoption beyond prototypes.
• Work location: San Jose, California, United States.

Nice to have

• Experience productionizing LLM, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic, conversational, or AI-assisted workflow solutions.
• Experience establishing AI evaluation and governance practices, including hallucination mitigation, confidence scoring, human oversight, security, privacy, auditability, and monitoring.
• Experience defining engineering or architecture standards across multiple projects and teams.
• Experience partnering with executive leaders, shaping domain AI architecture, and mentoring engineers across multiple levels.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off and an Employee Assistance Program.
• Wellness and travel reimbursement.
• Travel discounts and IATAN membership.
• Inclusive and accessible recruiting experience with accommodation support.