Principal Software Engineering Manager - AI Engineering (Position located in Bengaluru, India)

KnowBe4; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 3,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company-wide bonuses

Tuition reimbursement

Certification completion bonuses

Job summary

KnowBe4 is seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead a full-stack AI engineering team in Bengaluru, India. The role involves setting technical direction, mentoring team members, and driving the deployment of AI systems across various platforms.

Candidates should have extensive experience in data science and applied ML, alongside strong expertise in Python and AI engineering. The company offers a modern work environment and various employee benefits.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data science, applied ML, and AI engineering, with 3+ years leading cross-functional teams.
• Proven track record building and deploying AI systems.
• Expertise in Python and the modern data/ML stack.

Responsibilities

• Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing AI engineering team.
• Define the vision across the stack including model architectures and services.
• Drive design and deployment of LLM and SLM based architectures.

Skills

Data science

Applied ML

AI engineering

Model architecture

Python

Education

MS/PhD in CS, ML, or related field

Tools

AWS

PyTorch

FastAPI

Job description

KnowBe4 empowers the modern workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Trusted by more than 70,000 organizations worldwide, KnowBe4 is the pioneer of digital workforce security, securing both AI agents and humans. The KnowBe4 Platform provides attack simulation and training, collaboration security, and agent security powered by AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents) and a proprietary Risk Score. The platform leverages 15-years of behavioral data to combat advanced threats including social engineering, prompt injection, and shadow AI. By securing humans and agents, KnowBe4 leads the industry in workforce trust and defense.

Please submit your resume in English.

As a Principal Software Engineering Manager, you'll lead a full-stack AI engineering team of data scientists, ML engineers, software engineers, and data engineers – building the models, services, and pipelines that power our products end-to-end. You'll set the technical direction across the stack, turn applied research into production systems, and grow the people doing the work.

Responsibilities

• Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing full-stack AI engineering team spanning data science, ML engineering, software engineering, and data engineering.
• Define the vision across the stack – model architectures, services, data pipelines, and the evaluation and production-readiness standards that hold it all together.
• Drive the design and deployment of LLM and SLM based architectures and agentic systems – RAG, fine-tuning, retrieval, orchestration, and evaluation pipelines that hold up in production.
• Own outcomes end-to-end – from data ingestion and feature pipelines, through modeling and serving, to the APIs and product surfaces that put AI in front of users.
• Align teams around shared architectural principles and long-term technical goals. Partner closely with Product Management to align engineering designs with product requirements.
• Establish best practices for experimentation, model evaluation, observability, and responsible AI.
• Set clear goals, manage roadmaps, and deliver outcomes that move product metrics – not just model metrics.
• Stay deeply engaged with the cybersecurity landscape – emerging threats, evolving compliance requirements, and industry standards – so the team's work directly addresses the real-world challenges our customers face.

Requirements

You lead from the front – still close enough to the modeling work to set technical direction, but focused on multiplying your team's impact.

• 10+ years in data science, applied ML, and AI engineering, with 3+ years leading cross-functional teams that ship AI-powered products.
• Proven track record building and deploying AI systems – foundation models, ensemble architectures, RAG, fine-tuning, Generative AI and LLM orchestration.
• Strong hands‑on background in ML / DL modeling, statistical analysis, and rigorous evaluation.
• Comfort leading across the stack – data engineering, ML, and the backend services and APIs that productize it.
• Expertise in Python and the modern data/ML stack; comfort designing on AWS.
• Experience partnering with engineering on model serving, MLOps, and vector search.
• Track record of mentoring, hiring, and developing senior IC talent across multiple disciplines.
• Bonus points if you have:
• Background in cybersecurity, fraud, or other adversarial domains.
• MS/PhD in CS, ML, or a related field, or publications in GenAI / NLP.

The Tech You’ll Work With

• AI & LLMs: Anthropic Claude
• AWS Bedrock
• OpenAI
• HuggingFace
• PyTorch
• LangChain
• LangGraph
• Data & ML: Python
• FastAPI
• Pydantic
• PySpark
• Polars
• Parquet
• SageMaker
• Vector DBs (PGvector, OpenSearch)
• Cloud & Infra: AWS Lambda
• Batch
• Glue
• EventBridge
• Terraform
• GitLab CI/CD

Our Fantastic Benefits

We offer company-wide bonuses based on monthly sales targets, employee referral bonuses, adoption assistance, tuition reimbursement, certification reimbursement, and certification completion bonuses – all in a modern, high-tech, and fun work environment. For more details about our benefits in each office location, please visit www.knowbe4.com/careers/benefits.

Note: An applicant assessment and background check may be part of your hiring procedure.

Individuals seeking employment at KnowBe4 are considered without prejudice to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law. If you require reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre‑employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please visit www.knowbe4.com/careers/request-accommodation. No recruitment agencies, please.