Principal AI Platform Engineer (AI Platform)

MaintainX; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible time off

Equity opportunities

Training and development investments

Comprehensive healthcare coverage

Job summary

MaintainX is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the AI platform's technical vision and scale it to meet ambitious goals. You will lead architecture, set direction across divisions, and drive governance and reliability for agent, skill, and tool ecosystems.

You will define architecture, scale context graphs, and build the developer experience while shaping evaluation and observability. A track record of leadership and backend excellence is essential.

Qualifications

• Strong Python backend expertise with experience designing APIs, services and data pipelines.
• 3+ years building ML/LLM-powered systems in production with evaluation, latency, cost and reliability.
• 10+ years of software engineering with backend systems, distributed architecture or platform infra.
• Production agentic systems: multi-agent orchestration and tool use.
• Experience with MCP, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, and evaluation/observability platforms is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define the Agent/Skill/Tool architecture and evolve the platform for discovery and governance.
• Scale the context graph and knowledge systems to turn vast manuals and data into intelligent insights.
• Own developer experience including agent orchestration and observability.
• Design offline/online evaluation loops to improve agent performance from user interactions.
• Drive cross-division alignment and represent engineering externally.

Skills

Python backend

Architecture leadership

ML/LLM systems

Distributed systems

APIs design

Tools

LangGraph

LangSmith

Langfuse

BraintrustRAG pipelines

vector databases

Job description

• Our AI Platform is the catalog of Agents, Skills, and Tools that every product engineer at MaintainX assembles to ship AI-powered features. CoPilot, Root Cause Analysis, the Parts Agent, and the Scheduling Agent all run on it. As Principal Engineer, you will own the technical vision for the AI platform and scale it to match our ambition
• This is a senior individual contributor role reporting to VP of Engineering. You will lead through architecture, high-leverage technical decisions and products that produce long-term company outcomes. You will set direction across multiple divisions, align executives on platform strategy, and hold leaders accountable for engineering-wide adoption
• Define the Agent / Skill / Tool architecture. Evolve the platform so agents can reason, plan, and collaborate, skills are discoverable and reused across workflows, and tools expose structured, permission-aware access to operational data. Design for progressive autonomy as trust, reliability, and governance mature
• Scale the context graph. Architect the retrieval and knowledge systems that turn 14,000+ digitized equipment manuals, 370,000+ procedures created yearly, and 27M+ annual work orders into customer‑specific intelligence with cross‑asset reasoning
• Build the developer experience. Own agent orchestration, an MCP tool registry, reproducible dev environments, and the observability layer that makes agents trustworthy at scale. Engineers should define agent behavior through schemas and prompts while the platform handles routing, validation, evaluation, and observability
• Build the evaluation and feedback loop. Design offline and online evaluation systems so every user interaction (accept, refine, override) improves agent performance
• Drive cross‑division alignment. Partner with product engineering teams across Plant Setup, Maintenance Planning, Maintenance Execution, Reliability Engineering, Parts & Purchasing, and Reporting. Represent MaintainX engineering internally and externally

Benefits

• Flexible time off
• Competitive salary and equity opportunities
• Training and development investments
• Comprehensive healthcare coverage

Internal platform experience where your customers are other engineers. You treat developer experience as a product: adoption, documentation, enablement, and ergonomics are first‑classThe ability to write a clear design document, facilitate a technical decision across teams, and represent engineering externally with credibilityA track record of company‑wide technical leadership at the Principal level. You have defined architecture for systems used by multiple teams, influenced engineering strategy beyond a single division, and held leaders accountable for adoptionStrong Python backend expertise, with experience designing APIs, services, and data pipelines3+ years building ML or LLM‑powered systems in production, with real operating experience around evaluation, latency, cost, and reliability10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems, distributed architecture, or platform / infrastructure engineeringProduction agentic systems: multi‑agent orchestration, tool use, skill registriesMCP, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, plus evaluation and observability platforms like Langfuse, LangSmith, or BraintrustRAG pipelines, vector databases, embedding strategies, and knowledge graphs at scaleB2B SaaS, industrial software, IoT / OT, or other domains where AI must operate with high reliability and domain-specific context