Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Location: San Jose, California, United States

Salary: $249,000–$348,500 annual total cash range for San Jose, with potential pay up to $398,500 based on sustained performance.

Company

hirify.global is a global travel company connecting travelers, partners, and advertisers through consumer brands, B2B travel 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 forward-deployed engagements from discovery and use-case framing through technical design, prototyping, production deployment, adoption, and continuous improvement.
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into scalable, resilient, maintainable AI-enabled systems with explicit assumptions and data requirements.
• Design complex systems using system design, API design, data modeling, observability, evaluation, and testability practices.
• Evaluate models, platforms, tools, and architectural patterns for retrieval, orchestration, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop controls, and enterprise integration.
• Establish reusable AI and software engineering standards while coaching engineers and senior individual contributors across multiple teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, or master’s degree with 10+ years, or equivalent experience.
• Ownership of complex systems, workflows, or platforms supporting a business unit or function and integrating with broader enterprise systems.
• Deep expertise across the software development lifecycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control, testing, operations, system design, API design, data modeling, and observability.
• Experience making architecture and technology choices across teams and multiple technologies or languages.
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, or operating AI-enabled systems, tools, agents, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products or business processes.
• Experience working directly with business units to deliver usable technical solutions quickly and drive adoption beyond prototypes or pilots.

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 AI, software engineering, or architecture standards at department or organizational level.
• Experience partnering with executives, shaping domain strategy, mentoring engineers, and coaching senior technical talent.

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.