Principal Al Engineer

Cornerstone; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 5,000,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Cornerstone is seeking a Distinguished Principal AI Engineer to lead the creation of AI/ML solutions at scale within the Galaxy ecosystem. You will architect and build autonomous AI systems, implement robust ML pipelines, and drive enterprise-grade security and performance.

You will oversee end-to-end development—from model training to deployment—while ensuring privacy, fairness, and compliance across cloud-native environments in a fast-paced, collaboration-driven setting.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on AI/ML model development and deployment at enterprise scale.
• Strong security, reliability, and ethics in AI system design.
• Experience with cloud production environments (AWS/Azure/GCP) and MLOps pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on development, deployment, and improvement of AI-driven features.
• Architect and scale distributed AI systems and ML training pipelines.
• Design autonomous AI agents and multi-agent orchestration for HR and talent scenarios.

Skills

AI engineering

System architecture

MLOps

Cloud architecture

NLP

LLMs

Recommender systems

Generative AI

Distributed systems

Python

Java

Scala

C++

CI/CD

DevSecOps

Education

Bachelor/Master/PhD in CS/Engineering/ML

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Keras

Scikit-Learn

Ray

Kubernetes

Docker

Spark

React

Job description

About Cornerstone:

Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with modern, AI-driven employment solutions. Our platform enables companies to develop, manage, and engage their talentunlocking growth and innovation across organizations of all sizes.
Who Were Looking For:

Cornerstone is seeking a visionary and highly accomplished Distinguished Principal AI Engineer to spearhead the creation of groundbreaking AI and machine learning solutions across our industry-leading workforce agility - Galaxy ecosystem. This is a rare opportunity for a true innovatorsomeone who thrives on architecting and hands-on building intelligent, autonomous systems at massive scale. Youll be driving the future of workforce technology by delivering AI-powered applications that are robust, secure, ethical, and brilliantly performant.

In this role you will

• Full-Stack AI Engineering: Lead the hands-on development, deployment, and continuous improvement of sophisticated AI-driven features, leveraging Agile practices and top-tier coding standards.
• Advanced Architecture & System Design: Architect, implement, and scale modern, distributed AI systemsincluding training pipelines, streaming data processing, serverless microservices, and MLOps infrastructureto deliver enterprise-grade reliability and security.
• ML Model Innovation: Expertly design, build, and tune production AI/ML models (NLP, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, LLMs, Generative AI) using cutting-edge frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face, Keras, Scikit-Learn, Ray).
• Cloud & Data Engineering Mastery: Develop and optimize cloud-native (AWS, GCP, Azure) AI workloadsutilizing Kubernetes, Docker, Spark, and high-performance data lakes for advanced data wrangling, batch and real-time inference, and model monitoring.
• Agentic & Generative AI Technologies: Design and deploy intelligent, autonomous AI agents (LLMs, multi-agent systems) capable of planning, reasoning, and decision-makingsolving complex HR and talent management challenges with next-gen AI.
• Orchestration & Tooling: Build frameworks for multi-agent orchestration, message passing, prompt engineering, vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone), and scalable knowledge graphs to enable robust agent collaboration and negotiation.
• Task Automation & Workflow AI: Develop specialized AI agents for process automationstreamlining content generation, personalized recommendations, and end-to-end workflow optimization using RPA and conversational AI.
• Safety, Reliability, & Explainability: Set gold standards for AI safety, fairness, and explainabilityimplementing evaluation protocols, guardrails, and bias detection to ensure ethical agent behavior in real-world deployments.
• Seamless Systems Integration: Fuse agentic and generative AI systems with modern APIs, REST/gRPC, user interfaces (React, Angular), microservices, and enterprise data sources for resilient, scalable solutions.
• Performance Tuning & MLOps: Apply best-in-class techniques for model performance, hyperparameter optimization, scalable retraining, monitoring, and CI/CD for AI pipelines.
• Research, Innovation & Thought Leadership: Stay at the cutting edge with constant exploration of new AI technologiestransforming foundational research into impactful product features.
• Standards Advocacy: Champion software engineering excellencedriving best practices in secure coding, peer review, and responsible AI design throughout the full SDLC.

Youve got what it takes if you have

• Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or related field.
• 5+ years in software engineering with a minimum of 2+ years hands-on building, deploying, and optimizing AI/ML applications at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in AI/ML model development (NLP, Deep Learning, LLMs, Recommender Systems, Generative AI) and their deployment in cloud production environments.
• Advanced hands-on proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face, Scikit-Learn), modern programming languages (Python, Java, Scala, C++), and distributed systems (Kubernetes, Docker, Spark).
• Strong foundation in system architecture, algorithm design, scalable data engineering (ETL, batch & stream processing), and model serving.
• Experience with modern MLOps, CI/CD, GitOps, and DevSecOps methodologies.
• Commitment to ethical, responsible AIdeep understanding of privacy, explainability, bias, and regulatory considerations.
• Prior experience in HR tech, SaaS, or enterprise software highly advantageous.

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