Principal AI Engineer, Remote — Scale AI-powered Systems

Next Step Systems; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 144,000 - 176,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Savings plan

PTO

Job summary

Next Step Systems is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Email Applications. This 100% remote role will own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop, building AI-powered workflows and APIs that connect AI systems to product experiences.

You will lead a senior team, drive architectural trade-offs, and partner with ML leadership to ship robust product features. Ideal candidates have AI experience, strong backend shipping credentials, and a bias toward

Qualifications

• AI experience required.
• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.
• Experience building AI-powered products or systems that integrate with ML/LLM capabilities.
• Strong technical judgment and decision-making with incomplete information.
• Comfortable working across backend and client platforms.
• Ownership mindset and eagerness to ship and learn from usage.
• High standards for code quality and engineering fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Design reliable AI-powered workflows with state, orchestration, retries, and failure handling.
• Build APIs that connect AI systems to real-world product experiences.
• Lead a small senior engineering team and mentor engineers.
• Balance latency, reliability, cost, security, and UX in trade-offs.
• Establish production foundations: observability, monitoring, and testing.
• Partner with ML leadership to turn model capabilities into product experiences.
• Move quickly with simple, scalable architecture.

Skills

AI experience

Leadership

Backend systems

ML/LLM integration

Observability

Cross-platform

Job description

Next Step Systems is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Email Applications. This 100% remote role will own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop, building AI-powered workflows and APIs that connect AI systems to product experiences.

You will lead a senior team, drive architectural trade-offs, and partner with ML leadership to ship robust product features. Ideal candidates have AI experience, strong backend shipping credentials, and a bias toward