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Principal AI Engineer | Onsite

Job in San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, 94102, USA
Listing for: Photon
Full Time position
Listed on 2026-07-09
Job specializations:
  • Software Development
    AI Engineer (Applied/Software), Software Architect
Salary/Wage Range or Industry Benchmark: 64000 - 225000 USD Yearly USD 64000.00 225000.00 YEAR
Job Description & How to Apply Below

Job Description

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

Own and define enterprise-grade GenAI architectures, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, and multi-model routing strategies.

Drive production readiness for GenAI solutions, ensuring scalability, resilience, observability, and cost efficiency.

Lead complex architectural decisions spanning data ingestion, vector databases, model selection, guardrails, latency optimization, and API scalability.

Establish reference architectures and reusable patterns to accelerate GenAI adoption across Lines of Business.

Enterprise Use-Case Delivery (FDE Model)

Act as a Forward Deployed Principal Engineer, partnering directly with business and product teams to deliver high-impact GenAI use cases from ideation to production.

Translate business problems into well-defined AI system designs and NFRs, ensuring measurable outcomes.

Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across non-prod and prod environments.

Influence platform roadmap by feeding real-world use-case requirements back into central AI services (e.g., Tachyon).

Governance, Risk & Compliance

Ensure all AI solutions align with risk, cyber, and model governance standards, including AIRR, data protection, and guardrails.

Partner with Cyber, MRM, Legal, and Risk teams to design compliant AI patterns without slowing delivery.

Embed security, privacy, and ethical AI principles into solution design by default.

Organizational Influence & Mentorship

Serve as a recognized GenAI expert across the enterprise—regularly consulted by engineering, architecture, and leadership teams.

Mentor senior and staff-level engineers; raise the technical bar across teams.

Contribute to internal communities of practice, architecture reviews, and executive-level technical discussions.

Represent GenAI capabilities in internal innovation forums and knowledge-sharing sessions

Required Qualifications

7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in AI/ML or data-intensive systems.

2+ Years of experience in Python programming language.

2+ Proven experience designing and delivering production-scale Generative AI systems in an enterprise environment.

2+ years of experience in:

LLMs, prompt engineering, and RAG architecture

Vector databases and semantic search

API-driven, cloud-native architectures

Distributed systems and performance optimization

Preferred Qualifications

Strong understanding of non-functional requirements: security, scalability, resiliency, observability, and cost management.

Demonstrated Principal-level impact: influence across multiple teams, platforms, or business units.

Experience operating in highly regulated environments (financial services strongly preferred).

Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks and multi-model orchestration.

Prior experience in a Forward Deployed Engineer or embedded engineering model.

Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to senior executives and non-technical stakeholders.

Compensation, Benefits and Duration

Minimum Compensation: USD 64,000 Maximum Compensation: USD 225,000 Compensation is based on actual experience and qualifications of the candidate. Medical, vision, and dental benefits, 401k retirement plan, variable pay/incentives, paid time off, and paid holidays are available for full-time employees. This position is available for independent contractors No applications will be considered if received more than 120 days after the date of this post

Job Info

Job Identification 26326

Posting Date 06/29/2026, 06:43 PM

Degree Level Bachelor's Degree

Locations San Francisco, California, US

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