Principal AI Platform Architect — Scale Production LLMs

People In AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

People In AI is seeking a principal-level engineer to define how production AI systems are designed, evaluated, monitored, and scaled across the company. You will have broad technical ownership of a platform central to the next phase of the product roadmap.

The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, setting standards and guiding multidisciplinary teams from prototypes to durable customer-facing systems, focusing on evaluation, observability, retrieval, and reliability.

Qualifications

• Deep software engineering experience across backend systems, infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform engineering.
• Experience shipping AI or ML systems into production.
• Strong Python skills and ability to engage in rigorous coding and system design discussions.
• Experience with LLMs, retrieval, agents, NLP, evaluations, observability, or data ingestion.
• Ownership mindset to lead technically without formal management authority.
• Excellent communication across engineering, product, design and business teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale the company’s core AI platform and supporting infrastructure.
• Build evaluation frameworks, monitoring systems, ingestion pipelines, and observability tooling for production AI applications.
• Design and improve retrieval, embedding, prompting, and model-interaction workflows.
• Lead AI projects from experimentation through deployment, measurement, and ongoing optimization.
• Establish engineering standards for testing, versioning, quality control, and system reliability.
• Partner with product, design, engineering, and domain specialists to translate complex workflows into effective AI products.
• Provide technical direction and raise the quality of AI engineering across the wider organization.

Skills

Backend systems

Infrastructure

Distributed systems

Platform engineering

AI in production

Python

LLMs

Retrieval systems

NLP

Observability

Data ingestion

Job description

People In AI is seeking a principal-level engineer to define how production AI systems are designed, evaluated, monitored, and scaled across the company. You will have broad technical ownership of a platform central to the next phase of the product roadmap.

The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, setting standards and guiding multidisciplinary teams from prototypes to durable customer-facing systems, focusing on evaluation, observability, retrieval, and reliability.