Principal Applied AI Engineer

What makes us Qlik?

A Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for 15 years in a row, Qlik transforms complex data landscapes into actionable insights, driving strategic business outcomes. Serving over 40,000 global customers, our portfolio leverages pervasive data quality and advanced AI/ML capabilities that lead to better decisions, faster.

We excel in integration and governance solutions that work with diverse data sources, and our real-time analytics uncover hidden patterns, empowering teams to address complex challenges and seize new opportunities.

The Principal Applied AI Engineer Role

We are seeking a creative trailblazer to join us as a Principal Applied AI Engineer in our office in São Paulo. This is a high-visibility role reporting to our Director of Enterprise AI Acceleration, designed for a builder who thrives in a small, agile group focused on rapid innovation.

As "Customer Zero," you will lead our internal AI revolution. You won't just be selecting models you'll be building production agentic systems that drive real business outcomes. You'll be the ultimate power user of Qlik's 2026 AI suite (Qlik Answers, Qlik Talend Cloud, Qlik Cloud Analytics) while also building POCs with industry-leading tools to prove concepts fast. Your mission: move AI from experimentation to the boardroom, creating intelligent systems that impact Qlik's P&L while shaping our global product roadmap.

What makes this role interesting?

This is a role designed for engineers who want to build the future of enterprise AI, not just talk about it. You will work on the cutting edge of agentic systems, knowledge graphs, and retrieval architectures, solving complex problems that directly influence both internal operations and product innovation.

* Build production AI systems, not experiments:
Design and deploy real agentic AI solutions that support enterprise workflows and decision-making across the organization.

* Operate as "Customer Zero" for Qlik AI products:
Use Qlik's emerging AI technologies in real production scenarios, helping validate capabilities while identifying opportunities to strengthen the platform.

* Prototype rapidly with best-in-class tools:
Develop proof-of-concepts using frameworks such as Lang Chain, Llama Index, DSPy, or similar, while helping transition successful solutions into Qlik-native technologies as they evolve.

* Work in a high-autonomy innovation environment:
Join a small, agile engineering group focused on rapid experimentation and practical impact, where ideas move quickly from concept to deployment.

* Collaborate globally across AI, data, and product teams:
Work alongside business leaders, data scientists, and engineering teams across time zones to turn AI opportunities into operational systems.

* Shape the future of AI products used worldwide:
Your experiments and technical insights directly influence Qlik's global AI roadmap.

Here's how you'll be making an impact:

* Architecting Intelligence:
Build advanced Graph

RAG and Knowledge Graph systems that provide the reasoning layer for autonomous agents-enabling multi-hop queries across enterprise data.
* "Drinking Our Own Champagne":
Stress-test Qlik's emerging AI products by building real workloads, surfacing gaps, and feeding technical insights directly to R&D that shape future releases.

* Optimizing Retrieval:
Select and deploy embedding models, re-rankers, and hybrid search strategies that maximize retrieval accuracy and relevance for enterprise use cases.

* Mentoring the Next Generation:
Guide two mid-level Data Scientists on applied AI patterns, helping them deliver ML models and data pipelines that feed context-aware data into agentic systems.

* Building Agentic Systems:
Work with business leaders and builders to design and deploy production AI agents using best-in-class frameworks (Lang Chain, Llama Index, DSPy, or similar), transitioning to Qlik-native capabilities as our products mature.

We're looking for a teammate with:

Required:

* Applied AI Expertise: 8+ years delivering AI/ML solutions, with hands-on experience building RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, or production retrieval systems.

* Knowledge Graph Fluency:
Proven experience with graph…