Principal Software Engineer

Company Description

A division of Publicis Groupe, Publicis Digital Experience is a network of top-tier agencies designed to develop capabilities and solutions to enable growth and provide scaled access to the digital capabilities of Publicis Groupe in service of our clients. Together, the Publicis Digital Experience portfolio endeavors to create value at the intersection of technology and experiences to connect brands and people.

Our model to transform every brand experience will help clients navigate, develop, and activate commerce in a way that will provide them with a future-proof model for modern marketing. With our unique expertise in consumer engagement, CRM, and commerce, Publicis Digital Experience powers brands and empowers people in a new era of creativity. An ever-changing landscape and the need for fluid thinking is just part of our problem-solving nature.

Which means we're untethered from any specific medium or method—we go where ideas will work best.

We are an expanding network with more than 5,000 employees, with agency brands throughout our global offices. Publicis Digital Experience brands include Razorfish, Digitas, Arc Worldwide, Saatchi Saatchi X, Plowshare, 3

Share, Epsilon Auto and the Publicis Commerce Exchange.

Principal Engineer, AI/ML & Cloud, to serve as the top individual-contributor technical authority for our customer-facing AI capabilities and the cloud platform that powers them. This is a strategy-and-architecture role: you will define the reference architecture for Generative and Agentic AI on the platform, establish the engineering standards other teams build against, and personally deliver the hardest, highest-leverage pieces of the system.

You will operate as a force multiplier across the AI/data science and platform engineering teams -- shaping direction through architecture, design reviews, and hands-on mentorship rather than through people management.

The ideal candidate brings 13+ years of experience in Data Engineering and ML (including large-scale distributed systems and architecture), 3+ years of hands-on experience with Generative/Agentic AI in production, and a track record of designing and deploying production-grade AI solutions across a hybrid estate -- on-prem (Oracle) and AWS Cloud. You set technical vision, make the build/buy and platform decisions that others depend on, and are trusted to be right on the questions that matter most.

The position’s purpose includes, but is not limited to:

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for the AI platform -- from data foundations through model serving, retrieval, and agent orchestration -- and drive it from vision to production.
• Define reference architectures, engineering standards, and paved-path patterns that AI and platform teams build against.
• Make and document the high-stakes build/buy, model-selection, and platform decisions (frameworks, vector stores, inference strategy, cloud services), informing senior leadership of alternatives and trade-offs.
• Lead the analysis and design of net-new and enhanced AI capabilities for the marketing platform as per business strategy and requirements.
• Set the standard for the development environment, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering workflow across teams.
• Partner with QA, product, data science and production support to bring new or enhanced AI features to market and resolve the most complex issues.
• Establish monitoring, evaluation, cost-governance and reliability practices for production AI systems.
• Guide and de-risk platform, security, and version/patch upgrade strategy for the AI and cloud estate.

Duties and responsibilities:

• Act as the principal technical authority on AI and cloud architecture, driving alignment across developers,…