• The Principal Software Engineer, AI will:
• Architect and build new internal AI systems end to end, from first design to production, as the founding engineer.
• Own the hard parts of trustworthy AI at company scale: retrieval quality, permissions, security, and reliability.
• Work hands-on across the modern AI stack (LLMs, retrieval, agents, integrations) while keeping the foundations deliberately pragmatic.
• Embed with teams across the company, working day-to-day with function leaders and their teams and weekly with executive leadership, shipping AI into real workflows and leaving behind systems and owners that outlast the visit.
• Drive build-vs-buy evaluations and fast POCs, with the judgment to commit hard and kill fast.
• Work directly with executive leadership: what you build informs how the company makes decisions, every day.
• A track record of building production systems at Staff+ scope: data infrastructure, retrieval, or applied AI used daily by hundreds to thousands of people who depend on it.
• Hands-on depth with the modern AI stack, and at least one battle scar from a system that showed you how confidently AI can be wrong.
• Pragmatic technology instincts: you reach for proven tools by default and can defend the exceptions.
• Founding-engineer, consulting, or forward-deployed experience: comfortable owning outcomes inside someone else's domain.
• A daily working relationship with AI tools and agents, as instruments you build with and build for.
• The pragmatism to ship every few weeks, the standards to make it trustworthy anyway, and the communication skills to explain both to a CEO.