Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States; hybrid schedule with 3 days per week in the office.

Salary: $156,400–$253,000 per year, plus potential bonus and restricted stock units.

Company

Cybersecurity company developing secure cloud infrastructure, platform engineering capabilities, and AI-powered security solutions.

What you will do

• Define the strategic roadmap for autonomous AI investments and prioritize enterprise use cases using ROI and business-impact metrics.
• Design and build production-grade AI harnesses, closed-loop control systems, context-management systems, and recovery mechanics.
• Develop agentic frameworks supporting tool selection, multi-agent orchestration, function calling, MCP, and deterministic recovery.
• Implement advanced RAG pipelines using hybrid search, vector embeddings, chunking, reranking, and agentic retrieval.
• Build evaluation suites, LLM-as-judge pipelines, regression tests, observability, and LLMOps capabilities for reliable production deployment.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that embed secure AI platforms into developer workflows and multi-cloud environments.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software or ML engineering experience, including 2+ years in applied AI, RAG, LLM orchestration, or AI strategy execution.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, data science, engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Production experience delivering agentic AI solutions with measurable ROI and reliable operation at scale.
• Strong expertise in autonomous loops, state verification, step-wise evaluation, error recovery, context engineering, MCP, function calling, hybrid search, and vector databases.
• Experience with automated evaluation, production monitoring, AI safety, prompt-injection defense, data privacy, and compliance frameworks.
• Ability to align engineering, product, legal, and executive stakeholders on complex AI initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• In-person collaboration model with flexibility when needed.
• Opportunity to work on cybersecurity, AI, and cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale.
• Employee benefits, bonus eligibility, and potential restricted stock units.
• Visa or immigration sponsorship is available.
• Inclusive workplace with reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals.