Principal AI Engineer - Enterprise LLM & AI Systems

h2o.ai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

H2O.ai is seeking a Principal AI Engineer in San Francisco to design and ship end-to-end AI solutions for enterprise challenges, including agentic AI systems and production ML pipelines. This hands-on role sits with a customer-facing field team and will be measured by real business outcomes.

You will collaborate with Kaggle Grandmasters and ML engineers to move beyond demos, drive architecture, and lead multi-stream engagements from problem framing to production deployment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years hands-on AI/ML engineering experience.
• Experience leading technical delivery across complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise engagements.
• Experience building LLM-powered applications—RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, fine-tuned models.
• Strong Python engineering skills; experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and LLM tooling (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Experience deploying AI services in cloud or enterprise environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end technical engagement with enterprise customers.
• Coordinate workplans, resourcing, and milestones across cross-functional teams.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for customer issues.
• Build trusted relationships with data science teams and executives.
• Lead pre-sales and proof-of-concept engagements for enterprise trust.
• Represent H2O.ai at customer workshops and technical deep-dives.
• Design and build agentic AI systems and multi-agent frameworks.
• Develop and deploy LLM-powered applications (RAG, fine-tuning, tool use).
• Implement guardrails and responsible AI controls for production reliability.
• Stay current with agentic AI trends and bring best practices to engagements.
• Own development lifecycle across multiple streams from problem framing to production deployment.
• Build scalable backend services and APIs exposing AI capabilities.
• Integrate AI models into customer environments (cloud/on-prem/hybrid).
• Develop ML pipelines and LLMOps for production monitoring.
• Coordinate delivery across engineers, PMs, and solution architects.
• Set technical standards and review outputs across teams.
• Mentor junior ML engineers and solution engineers.

Skills

Python

LLM deployment

Cloud deployment

Kubernetes

LangChain

LlamaIndex

PyTorch

REST APIs

Leadership

Executive communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

LangChain

LlamaIndex

PyTorch

TensorFlow

scikit-learn

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

H2O.ai is seeking a Principal AI Engineer in San Francisco to design and ship end-to-end AI solutions for enterprise challenges, including agentic AI systems and production ML pipelines. This hands-on role sits with a customer-facing field team and will be measured by real business outcomes.

You will collaborate with Kaggle Grandmasters and ML engineers to move beyond demos, drive architecture, and lead multi-stream engagements from problem framing to production deployment.