Principal Platform Engineer - Applied AI; Remote

Overview

Be part of a transformative team shaping how First American builds and delivers AI technology capabilities to enhance our Platform Engineering and Technical Services groups. We are seeking Principal Applied-AI Platform Engineer candidates to grow our team. The ideal candidate has strong technical expertise, a product mindset, and takes a hands-on approach to leading a team building high-quality, sustainable AI-powered solutions.

As a Principal Applied-AI Platform Engineer, you will lead a small, focused platform engineering delivery team to drive initiatives and build fast, clean, resilient solutions in AI-automation and intelligence capabilities, enhance operational excellence, reduce toil, and amplify the impact of AI across our organization.

• Technical Leadership:
  Drive enterprise-wide technical decisions and deliver organizational transformation through AI-empowerment. Mentor and develop talent for a team of senior engineers, providing technical leadership.
• Lead AI-Powered Platform Solutions:
  Design and build AI-enhanced capabilities for platform engineering workflows including intelligent monitoring, automated incident response, and predictive capacity planning. Establish architecture patterns and best practices for integrating AI into platform services, ensuring solutions are maintainable, observable, and fault-tolerant.
• Deliver Production Impact:
  Ship AI solutions that measurably improve operational metrics including MTTR reduction, toil automation, incident prevention, and engineering productivity improvement. Own end-to-end delivery from problem identification through production deployment, training, and knowledge-transfer.
• Collaborate/Partner:
  Work with product teams and leaders to identify and implement AI solutions across Platform Engineering and Technical Services. Partner with platform engineering, SRE, and IT teams to identify opportunities where AI can transform operational capabilities and deliver hands-on improvements.
• Operational Excellence:
  Design and lead the development of high-quality, secure, and observable solutions. Create frameworks, libraries, and patterns that accelerate AI adoption and enable teams to extend solutions independently.
• Continuous Improvement:
  Manage the team to achieve ambitious goals, provide regular feedback, and participate in all aspects of the software development lifecycle for AI solutions, including planning, requirements, development, and testing.

• 7+ years of platform engineering or Dev Ops experience with deep expertise in SRE principles, Dev Ops practices, and operational workflows.
• Proven track record of enhancing platform and IT operations capabilities using AI.
• Hands-on experience with agentic workflows and MCP server integrations.
• Expert-level experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerized development (Docker), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Cloud Formation, Ansible).
• Experience driving engineering best practices for high-functioning Platform Engineering teams through automation and tooling.
• Passion and expertise for integration with back-end services and APIs using modern architectures and authentication mechanisms (OAuth).
• A strong understanding of software engineering and Dev Ops principles and modern infrastructure operations.
• Ability to build robust, high-scale, generic and reusable solutions.
• Ability to lead, mentor, and influence Platform and Dev Ops Engineers to share knowledge and improve quality.
• Ability to unblock teams and accelerate progress toward goals.
• Familiarity with deployment and observability strategies that support continuous delivery and high availability in a cloud-native environment.
• Outcome-oriented approach using metrics and data to understand development productivity metrics that inform continuous improvement (e.g., code churn, commit size, test coverage).
• Effective verbal and written communication skills with strong relationship, collaboration, and organizational abilities.

• AI ecosystem and integration such as MCP, agentic clients and frameworks.
• Infrastructure automation tooling (Terraform and Ansible).
• Experience with parallel execution models and time-boxed delivery methodologies.
• Track record of building reusable AI patterns and frameworks to accelerate adoption.
• Experience working in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services or Healthcare.

Pay Range: $166,750 - $222,325 Annually.

By choice, we embrace individuality and foster an authentic and inclusive workplace. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense. We support diversity, equity, and inclusion as foundations of our success.

Note: The following statements apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. First American may consider all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with applicable state and local laws.

First American…