Principal AI Software Engineer

Job Description Insight Global is looking for a Principal AI Software Engineer to support a global client. As a Principal AI Software Engineer, you will drive technical vision and architect enterprise AI applications for multiple initiatives across the company. You’ll integrate LLMs, agent workflows, NLP, computer vision, and predictive analytics to build secure, high-availability and cost-efficient AI based solutions. You’ll partner with product, data science, and engineering leaders, mentor teams, and raise standards in Agile, testing, security, and documentation. We support growth, autonomy, and collaboration across research and product. Responsibilities: Define AI architecture and technical strategy across multiple products and business initiatives. Design and build enterprise-scale AI applications utilizing LLMs, RAG architectures, AI agents, and orchestration frameworks. Architect cloud-native AI platforms with a focus on scalability, latency, reliability, resiliency, security, and cost optimization. Lead architecture reviews and make critical system design tradeoff decisions across AI products and platforms. Design highly available, distributed systems utilizing Kubernetes, cloud-native services, observability tooling, and modern engineering practices. Build and optimize end-to-end RAG pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding generation, vector indexing, retrieval optimization, reranking, and response orchestration. Establish standards for AI governance, monitoring, testing, model evaluation, and production support. Mentor engineers and influence technical direction across teams and organizations. Support products post-deployment, ensuring operational excellence, incident response readiness, and continuous performance optimization.

Hourly rate is based on experience: 75 - 100/hr Skills and Requirements Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field. 10+ years of software engineering experience building scalable production applications. Strong backend engineering experience with Python Experience architecting and deploying cloud-native applications in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Proven experience making system architecture decisions involving scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, security, performance, and cost tradeoffs. Demonstrated experience building and supporting highly available distributed systems in production environments. Hands-on experience designing and implementing production RAG systems, including: Document chunking strategies, Embedding generation, Vector database design, Retrieval optimization, Context management, Response orchestration Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, pgvector, OpenSearch, or similar technologies. Experience building production AI/LLM-enabled products serving real users at scale. Experience with containerized environments and Kubernetes/EKS. Demonstrated success leading technical teams, mentoring engineers, and driving architecture decisions. Experience owning applications throughout the full product lifecycle, including deployment, monitoring, observability, incident response, and production support. 13+ years of software development experience. Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, or Technical Architect experience. Advanced expertise in RAG architecture design and retrieval optimization techniques. Experience evaluating chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, reranking approaches, and retrieval quality metrics. Experience designing multi-agent systems and AI orchestration frameworks. Experience with AWS Bedrock, Bedrock Agents, Azure OpenAI, or enterprise AI platforms. Experience implementing AI observability, evaluation frameworks, and cost optimization strategies. Proven track record delivering highly available enterprise platforms with strict uptime and performance requirements. Experience with Java, Go, or Node.js We are a company committed to creating diverse and inclusive environments where people can bring their full, authentic selves to work every day. We are an equal employment opportunity/affirmative action employer that believes everyone matters. Qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, national origin, ancestry, genetic factors, age, disability, protected veteran status, military or uniformed service member status, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.