AI Platform Principal Engineer: Scale & Secure Enterprise

Kai; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Well-funded

Proven track record

Experienced founders

Leadership team

Applied research

Generous compensation

Job summary

Kai, an AI cybersecurity company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the AI platform engineering team in San Jose. You will set engineering standards, design architecture, and establish testing and deployment practices to scale AI services for enterprise security.

You will work with Head of AI, applied AI scientists, and backend engineers, mentoring engineers and guiding technical strategy while delivering reliable, maintainable, and scalable AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2 years in a leadership role setting standards
• M.S. in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or related field; PhD preferred
• Deep software architecture expertise; experience designing shared libraries and API contracts
• Production systems ownership at scale; experience with incident postmortems and monitoring
• Strong Python expertise with clean architecture and async patterns
• Proven testing leadership; designed test strategies for complex systems
• Cloud platform experience with Azure (preferred) or AWS/GCP; containerized microservices in production
• CI/CD maturity; consolidate build pipelines, quality gates, and deployment strategies
• Mentorship and technical leadership; grow engineers and collaborate with AI scientists
• Excellent communication skills across AI scientists, engineers, PMs, and leadership

Responsibilities

• Audit current services, architecture, and deployment practices to create an impactful engineering roadmap
• Design and implement shared library architecture with consistent patterns for config, DB access, logging, and health checks
• Build testing infrastructure: mock LLM APIs, staging integration tests, and CI plug-ins
• Consolidate CI/CD with parameterized pipelines, tests, lint, and deployment strategies
• Address production issues and establish patterns to prevent regressions
• Own architecture decisions across the AI platform: APIs, caching, data flow, service boundaries
• Lead AI team hiring: define roles, conduct interviews, build a 3–5 engineer team
• Mentor AI scientists on engineering practices to balance speed and research
• Design evaluation frameworks for LLM-powered features: measure accuracy and monitor production behavior
• Collaborate with backend to define API versioning, contract testing, SLAs, and data flow
• Translate business problems into technical architecture with product and AI leadership

Skills

Python

Software architecture

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Leadership

Mentorship

Communication

Testing leadership

Education

M.S. in Computer Science / AI / ML

PhD preferred

Job description

Kai, an AI cybersecurity company, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the AI platform engineering team in San Jose. You will set engineering standards, design architecture, and establish testing and deployment practices to scale AI services for enterprise security.

You will work with Head of AI, applied AI scientists, and backend engineers, mentoring engineers and guiding technical strategy while delivering reliable, maintainable, and scalable AI capabilities.