Principal Engineer

Meijer; Louisiana (MO); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Weekly pay

Scheduling flexibility

Parental leave

Education assistance

Team discount

Career development

Job summary

Meijer is seeking an experienced AI Architect to lead the architecture, design, and guidance for AI/GenAI initiatives across the organization. The role focuses on Azure-based AI solutions, RAG orchestration, and scalable architectures within a hybrid work model.

The ideal candidate will mentor engineering teams, drive best practices, and shape reference architectures for enterprise AI workloads, while prioritizing responsible AI governance and cost optimization.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years IT experience with architecture design.
• Experience with AI/GenAI in Azure environments.
• Knowledge of AI governance and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and review implementation details for a domain within AI solutions.
• Code and implement new patterns to establish conventions for teams.
• Mentor domain engineering teams on best practices.
• Provide engineering strategy for code modernization and standard patterns.
• Build proofs of concepts that are production ready.
• Guide development teams within domain requirements.
• Lead non-functional requirements (security, reliability, performance, scalability).
• Promote adoption of new technologies to improve processes and value delivered to customers.
• Define reference architectures for AI/Automation workloads on Microsoft Azure stack and related tooling.
• Guide LLMOps and responsible AI practices across domains and lead architectural reviews.

Skills

AI architecture

Azure stack

LLMOps

Leadership

Agile methods

GenAI frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Azure OpenAI

AKS

Azure Functions

Azure DevOps

RAG

LangChain

Job description

As a family company, we serve people and communities. When you work at Meijer, you're provided with career and community opportunities centered around leadership, personal growth and development. Consider joining our family – take care of your career and your community!

Meijer Rewards

• Weekly pay
• Scheduling flexibility
• Paid parental leave
• Paid education assistance
• Team member discount
• Development programs for advancement and career growth

The role will identify, analyze, and support business drivers, technology strategies, and current technology environments to recommend solutions to improve, develop, and align engineering to the specific domain. The position will lead, consult or oversee multiple highly complex projects/programs/domains that have significant impacts and require in-depth technical knowledge across multiple specific architecture disciplines such as technology, solution, business, or information/data.
Position follows our hybrid schedule: Monday-Wednesday in Grand Rapids MI corporate office, Thursday-Friday remote.

What You'll Be Doing:

• You will architect, design, and review implementation details for a specific domain within the company’s AI solutions.
• Designs, codes, and implements new industry leading design patterns in domain specific code bases, to create the convention/technique/practice that teams are accountable to follow.
• Mentors specific domain engineering teams on principles and best practices.
• Provides engineering strategy to ensure code modernization and industry standard patterns for specific domain.
• Builds proof of concepts (POCs) that are production ready.
• Provides guidance to development teams within domain requirements.
• Leads non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability and usability related to the specific domain.
• Promotes the implementation of new technology, solutions, and methods to improve business processes, efficiency, effectiveness, and value delivered to customers.
• Defines and evolves reference architectures for AI & Automation workloads on the Microsoft Azure stack - including Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) at scale, agentic and multi-agent orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool integration, and Microsoft Copilot Studio - ensuring alignment with Enterprise Architecture and security standards.
• Guides LLMOps and responsible AI practices across domains - including evaluation harnesses, guardrails and content safety, model routing and fallback, PTU/quota capacity planning, and cost optimization - and leads architectural reviews of AI/GenAI solutions prior to production deployment.

What You Bring with You (Qualifications):

• Bachelor's (or comparable combination of education and related experience).
• 5+ years of progressive responsibility in an IT environment with demonstrated technical knowledge which provides the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities.
• Advanced knowledge of software development best practices.
• Experience in the retail industry or in a production/service environment is preferred.
• Exposure to a wide variety of software project management methodologies and frameworks with a deep understanding of agile development methodologies.
• Successfully developed and implemented applications in new computing architecture environments using new and emerging technologies.
• Developed efficient and effective solutions to diverse and complex business problems
• Technical team leadership experience.
• Experience in Scaled Agile framework is preferred.
• Experience with multiple, diverse technical configurations, technologies, and processing environments.
• Experience with structured design, development and implementation of new and established computing architectures.
• Enterprise-scale experience architecting AI or GenAI solutions on the Microsoft Azure stack (Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, AKS, Azure Functions, Azure DevOps), including RAG, agentic and multi-agent orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and LLM evaluation frameworks, is preferred.
• Working knowledge of LLMOps, responsible AI governance (model risk, content safety, data privacy), and cost/capacity management (PTUs, quotas, model routing) for production AI platforms is preferred.
• Experience guiding teams through AI-assisted and spec-driven development, context/prompt engineering standards, and evaluating GenAI frameworks such as LangChain/LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, or AutoGen is preferred.