Principal AI Discovery & Personalization Engineer

Harnham; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham in Oakland, CA, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer focused on AI discovery and recommendations. You will own the architecture for scalable, AI-driven search, ranking, and personalization, and directly influence long-term AI strategy.

You will lead hands-on development, collaborate with Product and Data Science, mentor engineers, and ensure production-grade systems across a global user base, with a hybrid schedule in-office Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

Qualifications

• Extensive software engineering leadership at the Staff, Principal, or equivalent level.
• Proven experience building recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, search platforms, or personalized discovery products.
• Production experience developing and deploying LLM-powered applications or applied AI systems.
• Strong knowledge of semantic search, information retrieval, embeddings, and vector databases.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term architecture for AI-powered search, discovery, and personalization.
• Design recommendation systems that deliver relevant educational content based on user interests and intent.
• Mentor engineers and influence technical direction across multiple product areas.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to prototype, validate, and launch new AI capabilities.

Skills

Staff/Principal level

Recommendation systems

LLM deployment

Semantic search

Python backend

Distributed systems

Tools

AWS

React/Next.js

Job description

Harnham in Oakland, CA, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer focused on AI discovery and recommendations. You will own the architecture for scalable, AI-driven search, ranking, and personalization, and directly influence long-term AI strategy.

You will lead hands-on development, collaborate with Product and Data Science, mentor engineers, and ensure production-grade systems across a global user base, with a hybrid schedule in-office Monday/Wednesday/Friday.