Principal AI Engineer

Redtech is helping our client with a Direct Hire search for a Principal Engineer - AI
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Location: Issaquah (Seattle), WA - selected candidate must live within 50 miles of the selected work location. Relocation assistance available for eligible new hires located over 50 miles from the hub location of hire and who move to within 50 miles of the hub location. Relocation assistance available for eligible hires.

Schedule: 100% onsite, 5 days/week.

Able to support off‑hours work as required, including weekends, holidays, and 24/7 on‑call responsibilities on a rotational basis.

Background check & Drug Test: requires successful completion.

Eligibility: We are not able to offer any type of work sponsorship at this time.

Target Pay Range: $180,000 - $250,000/year DOE (top of the range only considered for exceptional experience).

Role is eligible for bonus and RSU's.

Client offers a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, health benefits—medical/dental/vision/hearing aid/pharmacy/behavioral health/employee assistance, health care reimbursement account, dependent care assistance plan, commuter benefits, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance, AD & D insurance, life insurance, 401(k), stock purchase plan, financial wellness program, to eligible employees.

The Principal AI Engineer is the lead architect and hands‑on builder of our unified AI Platform as a Service. This role is responsible for transforming raw foundation model capabilities into a scalable, multi‑tenant reasoning stack that empowers the entire enterprise to build, deploy, and manage semantic discovery, conversational intelligence, and autonomous agents. This role will balance 40% hands‑on system development with 60% platform strategy, personally coding the core orchestration engines, standardized capability servers, and universal trust guardrails.

The mission is to provide a central “AI Operating System” for the company, ensuring that specialized agents across different business units can communicate via inter‑agent protocols, access grounded knowledge layers securely, and execute autonomous tasks within a governed, high‑performance agent runtime environment.

• Develops and implements an industry‑leading, self‑service AI platform. This platform will offer standardized blueprints for engineering teams to utilize, including "macro‑agents" and "micro‑tools".
• Develops and articulates the long‑term, multi‑year technical roadmap for the AI platform, ensuring its capabilities are strategically aligned with the overarching business objectives.
• Develops and implements complex state graphs to manage edge cases and enable self‑c correction in autonomous planning.
• Leads the architecture and hands‑on development of remote MCP servers and implements custom function calling to securely connect agents with sensitive enterprise data.
• Defines and implements the communication standards for agent‑to‑agent interactions to facilitate autonomous discovery and task hand‑offs between agents developed by various business units.
• Ensures the agent identity layer is architected for granular permissioning and non‑repudiation, specifically regarding every autonomous system action.
• Develops a unified knowledge layer for the platform, leveraging semantic retrieval engine and multimodal grounding. This layer will serve as the single source of truth for all connected agents, providing “truth‑as‑a‑service”.
• Develops and implements a global memory bank architecture, leveraging semantic retrieval engine and graph databases. This system will be essential for preserving context and capturing “institutional knowledge” from interactions over time.
• Develops the platform's trust layer by automating rapid evaluation pipelines. These pipelines will measure key metrics of success, cost, and safety for agentic behavior across all tenants.
• Ensures the agent runtime environment lifecycle is managed to guarantee high availability, session persistence, and global scalability for the company’s digital workforce.
• Performs in‑depth, rigorous code reviews with a specific focus on identifying and mitigating the…