Principal AI Engineer - AgenticAI

BMC Software, Inc; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 175,800 - 293,000; Full time

Job summary

BMC Software, Inc is looking for a Principal AI Engineer to develop a next-generation Agentic AI platform. This hands-on role requires deep experience in producing AI-powered products and working in enterprise environments.

You will collaborate with leadership to define core AI systems, focusing on delivering reliable, cost-efficient solutions for external customers. Candidates should have significant experience in software development, particularly with Python and AI-related technologies.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development experience.
• Strong foundation in software engineering and expert-level Python.
• Proven experience building AI-powered products in production.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and GenAI systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve AI systems in production environments.
• Implement prompt engineering and tool use as engineering concerns.
• Integrate and operate LLMs for enterprise customers.
• Ensure systems are operationally robust and meet enterprise standards.

Skills

Software development

Python programming

AI product deployment

Prompt engineering

LLM and GenAI systems

Cloud platforms integration

Tools

AWS SageMaker

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

Job description

BMC empowers nearly 80% of the Forbes Global 100 to accelerate business value, faster than humanly possible. Our industry-leading portfolio unlocks human and machine potential to drive business growth, innovation, and sustainable success. BMC does this in a simple and optimized way by connecting people, systems, and data that power the world's largest organizations so they can seize a competitive advantage.

We are looking for a Principal AI Engineer to build our next‑generation Agentic AI platform from 0‑1. This is a hands‑on, delivery‑driven role for a senior engineer who has shipped AI‑powered products into real enterprise environments, understands the trade‑offs of production AI systems, and takes full ownership of outcomes – not just models or demos.

You will work alongside our VP of Engineering, VP of AI and product leadership to define and build the core AI systems of the platform. You will spend most of your time designing, coding, and shipping production‑grade AI capabilities used by external B2B customers. Success is measured by reliability, controllability, cost‑efficiency, and customer impact – not novelty.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve agentic AI systems that reason, plan, execute, and adapt in production environments.
• Take AI‑driven features from concept to production in a true 0‑1 product environment.
• Write and review high‑quality production code (Python‑first) across AI pipelines, inference services, orchestration layers, and supporting systems.
• Implement prompt engineering, tool use, memory, evaluation, and guardrails as first‑class engineering concerns, not experiments.
• Design agent frameworks that balance autonomy with determinism, observability, and safety.
• Make pragmatic architectural trade‑offs across latency, cost, accuracy, scalability, and maintainability.
• Integrate and operate LLMs (commercial and/or open‑source) including model selection, fine‑tuning strategies, embeddings, retrieval (RAG), and inference optimization.
• Address real‑world issues: hallucinations, drift, prompt regressions, failure modes, and customer trust.
• Deploy and operate AI services across cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), including secure enterprise integrations and customer‑specific deployments.
• Design scalable inference and orchestration architectures using containers, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Ensure the platform is shippable, debuggable, and supportable – not fragile or research‑grade.
• Act with founder‑level ownership: identify gaps, propose solutions, and move forward without waiting for perfect requirements.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, with significant time shipping B2B products used by external customers.
• Strong software engineering foundation with expert‑level Python and experience designing production systems.
• Proven experience building, deploying, and operating AI‑powered products in production, not just prototypes or research.
• Hands‑on experience with LLMs and GenAI systems in real applications (e.g., agents, copilots, automation, decision systems).
• Deep understanding of at least several of the following:
• Agent frameworks and orchestration
• Prompt engineering and tool‑use patterns
• RAG architectures and vector search
• Model evaluation, feedback loops, and monitoring
• Safety, guardrails, and enterprise controls
• Hands‑on experience with multiple of the following in real systems:
• LangGraph and/or LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• Vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Milvus)
• Prompt engineering as a managed, versioned, testable artifact
• Experience deploying and operating LLMs using:
• AWS SageMaker, Vertex AI, or equivalent managed platforms
• Direct API integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic)
• Experience designing multi‑agent systems or complex agent workflows.
• Experience commercializing AI features under enterprise constraints (security, compliance, uptime).
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information.

Nice to Have Skills

• Contributions to open‑source GenAI tooling or internal frameworks used at scale.
• Experience with Supervised fine‑tuning, Parameter‑efficient tuning methods (LoRA, QLoRA), reinforcement learning (RLHF) and preference optimization (PPO, DPO, GRPO).
• Experience deploying LLMs at scale (Kubernetes, model serving, GPU optimization).

Commitment

Our commitment to you!

BMC's culture is built around its people. We have 6000+ brilliant minds working together across the globe. You won't be known just by your employee number, but for your true authentic self. BMC lets you be YOU!

If after reading the above, you're unsure if you meet the qualifications of this role but are deeply excited about BMC and this team, we still encourage you to apply! We want to attract talents from diverse backgrounds and experience to ensure we face the world together with the best ideas!

BMC is committed to equal opportunity employment regardless of race, age, sex, creed, color, religion, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender, gender expression, gender identity, national origin, disability, marital status, pregnancy, disabled veteran or status as a protected veteran. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application and hiring process, visit the accommodation request page.

BMC Software maintains a strict policy of not requesting any form of payment in exchange for employment opportunities, upholding a fair and ethical hiring process.

The annual base salary range represents the low and high end of the BMC salary range for this position. Actual salaries depend on a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training, licensure, and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

The range listed is just one component of BMC's employee compensation package. Other rewards may include a variable plan and country specific benefits.

At BMC, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at /near the top of the range. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $175,800 - $293,000.