Principal AI Engineer

About this role

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer

Work Location:
Columbus, Ohio Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH

Contract Duration:
6–12 Months

Work Arrangement:
Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH (~10%, quarterly)

Job Description:

You'll be the
founding engineer
, building and operating the AI platform and the first production applications on it — end to end, from infrastructure and orchestration through evaluation and monitoring.

This is a
principal-scope, hands-on role
where you will ship code every week and own it in production.

What You'll Do:

- Build and operate the
governed enterprise MCP gateway and Azure AI environments
.
- Implement
SAP identity passthrough
in partnership with the IT/SAP organization.
- Own
CI/CD for AI assets
, evaluation, observability, and cost/usage telemetry.
- Ship the first production AI use case and prioritized portfolio including
retrieval, grounding, and agentic workflows
.
- Co-build with an enterprise integration partner while keeping core capabilities in-house.
- Define engineering standards, tooling, and practices and serve as a
technical lead
as the team grows.

Required Qualifications:

- 10+ years of software engineering
experience.
- Strong
Python and/or TypeScript
skills.
- Deep
Azure
expertise including infrastructure-as-code (Bicep or Terraform), networking, identity, container platforms, and Azure AI services.
- Production experience building and running
LLM or agentic systems
end to end.
- Experience with
evaluation engineering
, including datasets, metrics, regression tests, and CI release gates.
- Experience owning
CI/CD pipelines
using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
- Strong
identity-aware API and integration design
experience.
- Experience partnering with vendors while keeping core capabilities in-house.
- AI-augmented development
using tool...