Principal AI/ML Architect for Enterprise Platform

Coupa Software Inc.; Foster City (CA); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Global Wellness Days

BirthdayTime-Off

VolunteerTimeOff

Employee Assistance Program

Travel protection

Referral bonuses

Job summary

Coupa seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture to define the next generation of their AI platform, including training, evaluation, and serving of models. You will mentor ML and data engineers across US and India and collaborate with product and cloud operations teams.

You will have hands-on architecture work, prototype approaches, and set technical standards for safety and data isolation while shaping enterprise B2B SaaS AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on ML/AI systems.
• Experience training or fine-tuning large language models; shipped a fine-tuned or domain-adapted model to production.
• Deep knowledge of transformer architectures, training optimization (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, RLHF, DPO), and inference serving.
• Experience with distributed training on GPU clusters.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, vector search, embedding models, and knowledge graph integration.
• Hands-on experience with cloud AI/ML services (model hosting, managed training, or equivalent).
• Experience designing and running custom evaluation suites for LLMs.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure tooling.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture for model training, evaluation, and serving across Coupa's AI platform.
• Evaluate and select model approaches against enterprise accuracy and cost requirements.
• Design evaluation frameworks that measure model quality on Coupa's specific task categories.
• Drive technical partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providers.
• Architect training data pipelines, including synthetic data generation and quality validation.
• Design retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that extend our existing RAG infrastructure with structured knowledge retrieval.
• Establish technical standards for model safety, tenant data isolation, and responsible AI.
• Write code, review PRs, and prototype approaches, especially in the early phases.
• Mentor and guide ML and data engineers across US and India.
• Collaborate with product, existing AI platform, and cloud operations teams.

Skills

Software engineering

ML/AI systems

Training large language models

Fine-tuning LLMs

Transformer architectures

Distributed training

RAG architectures

Vector search

Knowledge graph integration

Python

PyTorch

ML infrastructure tooling

Education

Advanced degree in CS/ML

Tools

GPU clusters

Model hosting

Managed training

Inference serving

Job description

Coupa seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture to define the next generation of their AI platform, including training, evaluation, and serving of models. You will mentor ML and data engineers across US and India and collaborate with product and cloud operations teams.

You will have hands-on architecture work, prototype approaches, and set technical standards for safety and data isolation while shaping enterprise B2B SaaS AI capabilities.