Principal Al Engineer - India

Cornerstone; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Cornerstone is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to set the technical direction for the Architecture team that forms the backbone of our Cornerstone AI Platform. This high-ownership role will shape architecture standards and drive end-to-end production-scale components across the product line.

You will mentor senior engineers, define reusable patterns, and collaborate with product, operations, database, and security teams to power features used by a global workforce.

Qualifications

• 8+ years backend engineering experience in Java and/or Python.
• Hands-on production AI/ML/GenAI system architecture at scale.
• Strong AWS cloud fundamentals and IaC (Terraform).
• Expert API/platform design with multi-tenant isolation.
• SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs, Redis experience.
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-team collaboration.
• Degree in CS/Engineering/ML or equivalent

Responsibilities

• Define and own architectural foundation for the Cornerstone AI Platform, including auth, API Gateway, and platform standards.
• Architect and operate a multi-tenant LLM Platform with model routing, prompt versioning, guardrails, observability, and cost governance.
• Build and improve RAG pipelines: embedding, Vector DB retrieval, generation, and data freshness.
• Design and deploy the Agentic Platform and MCP integration layer with secure connections to systems.
• Define quality metrics for voice-based assistants and AI capabilities.
• Own the AI Evaluation Platform, including offline/online eval and regression detection.
• Contribute to Message Streaming Platform across microservices at scale.
• Lead solution design for new AI services and align cross-functional teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar.

Skills

Backend engineering

Java

Spring / Spring Boot

Python

Architecting AI/ML systems

GenAI platforms

Cloud platforms (AWS)

API design

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

AWS (EKS/Kubernetes)

IAM

DynamoDB

RDS

KMS

S3

Terraform

Vector DBs

RAG pipelines

Job description

Who We're Looking For

Cornerstone is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to set the technical direction for the Architecture team that forms the backbone of our Cornerstone AI Platform. This is a high-ownership, high-influence role where you will architect the platform's core AI building blocks: the LLM Platform, RAG and Vector DB retrieval, the Agentic Platform and MCP integration, Message Streaming, API Gateway design, voice-based role-play assistants, and the Eval framework that every AI capability across the product suite depends on.

Your design decisions shape how AI is built, scaled, and validated across the entire Cornerstone product line. You will set architecture standards and patterns that applied ML and product teams build on top of, drive end-to-end implementation of production-scale platform components, and mentor and level up the senior engineers around you. If you want to work at the intersection of modern GenAI platform engineering and see your architecture power features used by a global workforce.

In This Role You Will...

• Define and own the architectural foundation for the Cornerstone AI Platform, including authentication and authorization, API Gateway design, and the standards and patterns every AI service is built on.
• Architect and operate a multi-tenant LLM Platform used by multiple product teams, covering model routing, prompt versioning, guardrails, observability, and cost governance.
• Build and improve RAG pipelines: chunking strategy, embedding, Vector DB retrieval, generation, hallucination reduction, knowledge freshness, and multi-tenant data isolation.
• Design and deploy the Agentic Platform and MCP integration layer, defining how agents plan, call tools, recover from failures, and connect securely to internal and partner systems.
• Design voice-based role-play assistants end-to-end and define quality metrics: WER, intent accuracy, turn latency, and task completion rate.
• Own the AI Evaluation Platform, covering offline and online eval frameworks, regression detection pipelines, and the quality metrics every AI capability is measured against.
• Contribute to and extend the Message Streaming Platform that processes internal and external events across microservices at scale.
• Lead solution design for new AI services, set reusable patterns and cross-team standards, and build cross-functional alignment across product, operations, database, and security teams.
• Mentor senior engineers, conduct design reviews, and raise the technical bar across the team.

You’ve Got What It Takes If You Have...

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience in Java (Spring / Spring Boot) and/or Python.
• Deep, hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating production-grade AI/ML and GenAI systems at scale.Proven depth in RAG pipelines, Vector DBs, LLM platforms, Agentic platforms and agents, MCP integration, voice-based assistants, and Eval frameworks and metrics.
• Strong cloud fundamentals on AWS (EKS/Kubernetes, IAM, DynamoDB, RDS, KMS, S3) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Expert-level API and platform design, including versioning, backward compatibility, multi-tenant isolation, and rate limiting.
• Proficiency across SQL (RDS), NoSQL (DynamoDB), Vector DBs, and caching (Redis).
• Demonstrated technical leadership: setting org-wide architecture standards, driving cross-team alignment, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

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