Principal Engineer, AI Platform

Hidden Jobs; United States; Remote; USD 253,000 - 348,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock plan

Unlimited vacation

Educational reimbursements

Wellness reimbursements

Zero-cost insurance

Job summary

Ridgeline’s AI Platform team seeks a Principal Engineer to shape architecture and delivery of agentic AI capabilities embedded in a customer-facing investment management product. The role blends technical strategy with hands-on system design and cross-company influence.

You will partner with platform engineers, product, data, and other teams to define scalable, secure, and reliable AI systems, including retrieval-augmented generation and model routing.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering with deep systems architecture experience.
• Experience shipping an AI-powered product in production, including agentic loop design, structured responses, tool calling, MCP, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Proven ability to design scalable, efficient system architectures and evaluate technologies for AI system components.
• Experience establishing best practices and reliability/evaluation standards for AI models in production.
• Full-stack AI product development with Kotlin, TypeScript, and React; hands-on experience across front-end and back-end.
• Hands-on experience with Anthropic and/or OpenAI models and APIs, with cross-team alignment.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for the AI platform.
• Lead decisions enabling scalable, reliable, secure, and responsible use of AI platform capabilities.
• Identify and resolve systemic obstacles limiting availability, usability, extensibility, or reliability of the AI platform.
• Establish engineering standards and evaluation standards for AI models in production.
• Partner across Engineering, Product, Data, and other functions to align AI platform investments with priorities and outcomes.
• Architect solutions for data integration and token-efficient AI usage through model routing and code execution.
• Propose and evaluate new AI features to advance the platform and resolve technical debates.

Skills

Systems architecture

AI platform experience

Kotlin

TypeScript

React

Model Context Protocol

RAG

Tool calling

OpenAI API

Anthropic API

Tools

Anthropic API

OpenAI API

Job description

Role overview

A Principal Engineer on the AI Platform team will shape the architecture and delivery of agentic AI capabilities embedded in a customer-facing investment management product. The role combines technical strategy, hands-on system design, and cross-company influence, partnering with the engineers who built the platform's foundation and with product, data, and engineering teams throughout the firm.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for the AI platform and shared AI capabilities across the company.
• Lead technical decisions that allow engineering teams to use AI platform capabilities in scalable, reliable, secure, and responsible ways, and proactively bring teams building one-off AI solutions onto the shared platform.
• Identify and resolve systemic obstacles that limit availability, usability, extensibility, or reliability of the AI platform.
• Establish engineering standards and architectural approaches, including reliability and evaluation standards for AI models in production, that help teams make sound decisions as AI evolves.
• Partner across Engineering, Product, Data, and other functions to align AI platform investments with company priorities and customer outcomes.
• Architect solutions for integrating external data via retrieval-augmented generation, connections to third-party data stores, and token-efficient AI usage through model routing and code execution.
• Propose and evaluate new AI features to advance the platform and resolve technical debates across teams.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with deep systems architecture expertise.
• Significant experience building and shipping an AI-powered product in production, including agentic loop design, structured responses, tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Proven ability to design scalable, efficient system architectures and evaluate the right technologies for AI system components.
• Experience establishing software development best practices and reliability or evaluation standards for AI models in production.
• Full-stack experience across front-end and back-end AI product development, with proficiency in Kotlin, TypeScript, and React.
• Hands-on experience with Anthropic and/or OpenAI models and APIs, and a track record of aligning stakeholders across teams amid competing technical viewpoints.
• Demonstrated success integrating third-party data sources and delivering measurable improvements in AI model performance and token efficiency in production.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-agent systems, AI agent orchestration, or advanced model evaluation techniques.
• Background in financial services or investment management.
• Contributions to open-source AI or ML projects, or publications in the space.

Benefits and work setup

• Remote role.
• Typical starting salary range of $253,000-$316,000, with an alternate range of $278,000-$347,500 in select locations including the San Francisco Bay Area and the New York City Metro Area.
• Eligibility for the company stock plan, plus unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and $0 cost employee insurance plans.