Senior Principal Software Engineer

The Data And AI team is a highly focused effort to lead digital-first execution and transformation at Red Hat leveraging data & AI strategically for our customers, partners, and associates. The engineering team is focused on building and delivering strategic AI Factory platform for building Skills and Agents, designed to augment human capabilities, accelerate business workflows, and scale operations across the enterprise.

In this role, you'll take ownership of end-to-end AI/ML systems, champion best practices, and deliver impactful, production-grade models. You'll work autonomously, mentor others, and collaborate with data, engineering, and product teams to bring AI features into production.

What you will do?

• Design, build, and evolve ML pipelines that cover data ingestion, preprocessing, feature engineering, training, validation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Design, build, and evolve MCP server, Skills and Agents that enable and empower Red Hatters to do business efficiently.
• Translate research prototypes and models into production-quality code, ensuring robustness, scalability, and maintainability.
• Select appropriate algorithms and modeling techniques, perform hyperparameter tuning, and conduct comparative experimentation.
• Evaluate and validate model performance using advanced metrics (e.g. ROC-AUC, precision/recall curves, calibration, fairness, drift) and set up continuous validation/regression checks.
• Collaborate with software engineers, data engineers, and SRE/DevOps to integrate ML services into broader systems.
• Instrument models and systems with monitoring, logging, alerting, and automated healing or scaling mechanisms.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents, root-cause errors, data drifts, performance regressions, or infrastructure issues.
• Mentor more junior engineers, lead code reviews, and help establish ML lifecycle and quality standards.
• Stay current with emerging ML research, frameworks, and tooling, and proactively propose improvements or experiments.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of software development experience with a focus on machine learning pipelines or machine learning applications or building ML platforms
• Exceptional software engineering skills that lead to elegant and maintainable data platform
• Proficiency in at least one general purpose programming language, eg. Python, Go, Java, Rust, etc.
• Loosely held strong opinions and perspectives that you kindly debate, defend, or change to ensure that the entire team moves as one
• Sets and resets the bar on all things quality, from code through to data, and everything in between
• Deep empathy for your users of your platform, leading to a constant focus on removing friction, increasing adoption, and delivering business results
• Prunes and prioritizes work in order to maximize your contributions and impact
• Bias for action and leading by example
• Past experience in building enterprise data platforms that have a high level of governance and compliance requirements

Optional Skills

• Familiarity with open source or inner source development and processes
• Familiarity of data mesh architectural principles
• Experience with Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, Airflow / Astronomer
• Deep hands on knowledge of Vector Databases, RAG Pipelines is a huge plus.

Personal qualities and communication

• Communication skills and experience in interacting with cross functional business and engineering teams

• Capability in undertaking business needs analysis in direct consultation

• Motivated with a passion for quality, learning and contributing to collective goals

• • Excellent communication, presentation, and writing skills

(part of IBM) 4.04.0 out of 5 stars Lowell, MA $193,390 - $318,980 a year - Full-time, Pulled from the full job description

• Tuition reimbursement
• Military leave
• Paid parental leave
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Parental leave
• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching, Red Hat determines compensation based on several factors including but not limited to job location, experience, applicable skills and training, external market value, and internal pay equity. Annual salary is one component of Red Hat's compensation package. This position may also be eligible for bonus, commission, and/or equity. For positions with Remote-US locations, the actual salary range for the position may differ based on location but will be commensurate with job duties and relevant work experience., * Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible Spending Account - healthcare and dependent care
• Health Savings Account - high deductible medical plan
• Retirement 401(k) with employer match
• Paid time off and holidays
• Paid parental leave plans for all new parents
• Leave benefits including disability, paid family medical leave, and paid military leave
• Additional benefits including employee stock purchase plan, family planning reimbursement, tuition reimbursement, transportation expense account, employee assistance program, and more!

Note: These benefits are only applicable to full time, permanent associates at Red Hat located in the United States.

Inclusion at Red Hat Red Hat's culture is built on the open source principles of transparency, collaboration, and inclusion, where the best ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. When this is realized, it empowers people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to come together to share ideas, challenge the status quo, and drive innovation. Our aspiration is that everyone experiences this culture with equal opportunity and access, and that all voices are not only heard but also celebrated. We hope you will join our celebration, and we welcome and encourage applicants from all the beautiful dimensions that compose our global village.