Principal Engineer

Kornferry; Bengaluru; Hybrid; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Kornferry is seeking a senior software engineer in Bengaluru, India to own end-to-end delivery of LLM-powered and agent-based systems. You will work in a global distributed squad with overlap with Europe and North America, building scalable platforms and core runtimes.

Ideal candidates have 6+ years of software engineering, strong system and API design skills, and hands-on cloud experience with Kubernetes and container ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of Software Engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agent-based systems in production.
• Solid fundamentals: system design, API design, data modelling, clean code.
• Production cloud systems with containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience with distributed systems and reliability patterns.
• Familiarity with agent tooling and LLM ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects and set technical direction for cross-functional teams.
• Own end-to-end delivery from scope to production in a global squad.
• Explain trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

Senior IC

Platform & API

LLM/Agent systems

Distributed systems

System design

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Prompt engineering

API design

Observability

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

Docker

IaC

CI/CD

Job description

We're looking for someone with 6+ years of Software Engineering experience and hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agent-based systems in production.

Technical Skills

• Principal individual contributor
• Platform & API; core runtime; logic modernisation
• India-based role in a global distributed squad; planned overlap with Europe and North America and ownership of outcomes end to end.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, data modelling, and clean, maintainable code.
• Experience building and running production systems in the cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers, Kubernetes or similar, and infrastructure as code.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems: queues, async workflows, concurrency, reliability, and failure handling.
• Practical experience building with LLMs: tool use, agents, prompt and context engineering, RAG, and evaluation.
• Familiarity with agent protocols and ecosystems (e.g., MCP) and with using AI coding tools day to day.

Leadership & Ownership

• Comfort working independently and handling ambiguity: you can take a loosely defined problem, scope it, and drive it to production.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• At the senior level, we also expect you to lead projects and set technical direction, mentor other engineers, define evaluation and quality standards, and influence architecture across teams.

Mindset & Collaboration

• Growth mindset curious, always learning, and open to feedback.
• Works closely with the engineers who use these tools every day; you help the whole organization build software better and faster.

Nice to Have

• Experience with trace analysis or log mining to find and fix agent failure modes.
• Experience building internal platforms or SDKs that other teams adopted.
• Background in observability, CI/CD, or developer productivity tooling.
• Experience with model routing, cost optimization, or prompt caching.
• Open-source or public contributions in agent tooling or LLM infrastructure.