Principal AI Engineer (AI)

Location: Los Angeles, CA; candidates must be based in the Los Angeles area. Hybrid work is required.

Salary: $150,000–$350,000 base salary per year, plus equity

Company

A PE-backed holding company acquires mid-market software businesses and rebuilds their operations and products around AI through a central technology capability.

What you will do

• Build core infrastructure for production AI agents, including task execution, context management, external system interactions, and coordination.
• Develop systems that support increasingly complex software engineering work while maintaining execution controls, access permissions, and human oversight.
• Create internal tooling to assess unfamiliar software estates, identify technical constraints, and locate high-leverage AI opportunities.
• Implement isolation, permissions, spend management, escalation paths, testing, measurement, and observability for reliable production AI systems.
• Build abstraction layers that allow models and infrastructure to evolve without repeated downstream application rewrites.
• Work with portfolio engineering teams to design and ship transformation solutions while improving deployed system performance and economics.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including platform, infrastructure, or complex production systems work.
• Deep Python expertise and strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience building production AI or agentic systems beyond basic LLM API integration.
• Strong systems design judgment around reliability, observability, failure modes, testing, and operational ownership.
• Ability to take ambiguous problems from architecture through implementation and work effectively with senior engineering leaders.
• Clear technical perspectives on agent architecture, evaluation, model selection, cost, and build-versus-buy decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience with developer tooling, legacy software, or technology transformation.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on individual contributor work spanning central technology and portfolio-company transformation.
• Production-focused environment emphasizing engineering quality and measurable business impact over research alone.
• Permanent hybrid role based in the Los Angeles area.
• Equity in addition to the base salary.