Principal Software Engineer - Vehicle AI

Location: Hybrid, with reporting at least three times per week to Austin, TX, Mountain View, CA, or remote work from Washington State. The role is based out of the Mountain View or Seattle offices and may be eligible for relocation benefits.

Salary: $238,700–$365,700 base salary annually, plus potential incentive compensation.

Company

hirify.global develops automotive products and technologies focused on zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.

What you will do

• Define the end-to-end architecture for an in-vehicle AI Assistant across Android client applications and cloud backend services.
• Drive technical strategy and align system boundaries and interface contracts across Cloud AI/ML, In-Cabin UX, Product Management, Security, and Data Engineering.
• Architect hybrid edge-cloud orchestration, balancing on-device latency, network bandwidth, cloud compute cost, and offline reliability.
• Establish API protocols for real-time client-server communication using gRPC and streaming audio and text interfaces.
• Evaluate and integrate AI/ML agent frameworks, large language model orchestrators, and tool execution engines.
• Lead platform testing, evaluation pipelines, telemetry standards, architectural dependency resolution, and mentoring for Staff and Senior engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of professional software development experience designing large-scale distributed systems across client applications and cloud microservices.
• Technical depth in Android architecture using Kotlin or Java, plus microservices, REST, gRPC, and streaming APIs.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical strategy and architectural alignment across multiple engineering organizations.
• Expertise in client-server interaction patterns, state synchronization, and low-latency network communication.
• Ability to define multi-year technical roadmaps and translate product vision into scalable platform architectures.

Nice to have

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with conversational AI, voice assistant frameworks, or agentic LLM orchestration.
• Familiarity with Android Automotive OS and in-cabin system constraints.
• Experience with edge-cloud computing, client-side machine learning, and server-side model streaming.
• Strong communication skills for explaining architectural trade-offs to senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

Culture & Benefits

• Company vehicle evaluation program may be available after successful motor vehicle report review.
• Potential incentive compensation based on company, job-level, and individual performance.
• Employee benefits support well-being at work and at home.
• Inclusive workplace with equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations.

Hiring process

• Applicants may be required to complete role-related assessments and pre-employment screening.