AI Principal Engineer| Hybrid or NYC, NY

Position: AI Principal Engineer| Hybrid  or NYC, NY
Let’s be unstoppable together!

Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high-quality data set.

At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives. We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings.

By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work. Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®.

This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working rn more at

Role Overview Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. AI Principal Engineers build the foundations of that ecosystem. Leading a team, a principal designs and builds the platforms everything else runs on:
Circana's agent platform, and a software factory where agents build, test, and ship software while people set intent and approve what goes live. Principals set the patterns and standards other teams build on, own the hardest technical problems, and are the engineers other senior engineers turn to. When a critical initiative needs it, a principal also leads from the front: embedded with a business team for a defined push, working alongside Forward Deployed Engineers, then folding what they learned back into the platform.

Job Responsibilities Design and build Circana's agent platform and the ecosystem around it: runtime, agent identity and access, tool and MCP registries, context and memory services, evaluation, observability, and deployment.

Build a dark software factory: largely autonomous pipelines in which agents turn specs into tested, reviewed, and deployed software, with humans setting intent and approving releases.

Lead a team of engineers building these systems: set technical direction, review the work, mentor, and raise the bar.

Own harness engineering: context management, tool contracts and MCP servers, guardrails, retries and graceful degradation, tracing and replay.

Establish evaluation as infrastructure: golden traces, regression suites, routing tests, offline and online measurement, and release gates.

Own the shared patterns, services, and conventions other teams build on, so every build is faster than the last.

Lead embedded engagements when needed, for example a 90-day push with a business team to take an entire workflow agentic, and turn what worked into platform capability.

Represent the work credibly to product owners, architects, security, executives, and client stakeholders.

Requirements
10+ years of engineering experience, including designing and owning a platform or shared system used by many teams, and setting technical standards that other senior engineers adopted.

Has built platform infrastructure end to end: runtime and deployment, identity and access, multi-tenant services, and observability.

A strong track record of designing and shipping agentic…