Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems (AI)

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States. Must be based in or living in the Bay Area.

Salary: $400,000 – $550,000 per year

Company

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation creating Pi, the world's first emotionally intelligent AI designed to empower people's potential.

What you will do

• Build production AI agents capable of planning, context retrieval, tool usage, and failure recovery.
• Design agent architectures for task decomposition, memory, state management, and safe execution.
• Develop evaluation and observability systems for tool-call accuracy, hallucination resistance, and latency.
• Integrate AI agents with APIs, SaaS tools, and enterprise systems.
• Implement guardrails, structured outputs, and human-in-the-loop controls to improve system reliability.
• Mentor senior engineers and establish technical standards for the next generation of intelligent agents.

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with 3+ years in staff/principal roles.
• 2+ years of experience building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems for real customers.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript.
• Strong backend fundamentals (APIs, databases, queues, cloud infrastructure).
• Experience with tool/function calling, embeddings, retrieval, and prompt design.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field.

Nice to have

• Experience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, or vLLM.
• Expertise in multi-agent systems, agent memory, or browser automation.
• Knowledge of building eval pipelines and AI safety systems.
• Experience in early-stage, high-growth, or zero-to-one product environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
• 401k matching program.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Parental leave and flexible arrangements for caregivers.
• Visa support for international employees living in the Bay Area.