Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform

Kai; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Kai is building an AI-powered cybersecurity platform and seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the AI platform engineering team. You will set standards, design the system architecture, and mentor engineers while collaborating with AI scientists and backend developers.

You will shape testing, deployment practices, and scalability to ensure reliable, maintainable AI services that ship with confidence.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership or staff+ role.
• Deep software architecture expertise with shared libraries, API contracts, and coding standards.
• Production systems ownership at scale with monitoring and incident postmortems.
• Strong Python expertise with clean architecture and async patterns.
• CI/CD and DevOps maturity, deployment strategies and release processes.
• Excellent communication skills interfacing with AI scientists, backend engineers, product managers, and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Audit and roadmap: assess current services, architecture, and deployment practices; produce an engineering roadmap.
• Establish engineering foundations: design shared libraries, API contracts, coding standards, and quality gates.
• Build testing infrastructure: design testing strategy for LLM integrations and CI pipelines.
• Consolidate and fix CI/CD: create a parameterized pipeline template with canary and rollback strategies.
• Fix critical production issues and establish patterns to prevent recurrences.
• Own architecture decisions across the AI platform and data flow.

Skills

Python

Software architecture

Production systems

Mentorship

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Tools

Azure

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

LLM APIs (Anthropic/OpenAI/Azure OpenAI)

Job description

Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform

Kai is the AI company rebuilding cybersecurity for the machine-speed era. Founded by second-time founders and trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises, Kai is building a future where security has no categories, no silos, and no human speed bottlenecks. The Kai Agentic AI Platform replaces fragmented, human-limited workflows with Agentic AI systems that continuously contextualize, assess, reason, and execute security work at machine speed - making human defenders, superhuman.

Why Join Kai

• Well-funded: With $125M raised, we have the capital, runway, and resolve to rebuild cybersecurity from first principles.
• Proven: We\'ve earned the trust of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, and we\'re just getting started. Their confidence in Kai reflects what we\'ve built: an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that performs at the scale and speed the enterprise demands.
• Experienced founders: Our founding team consists of second-time entrepreneurs, each with over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry. Their proven expertise and vision drive our ambitious goals.
• World-class leadership team: Our Heads of AI, Engineering, and Product bring extensive experience from some of the world’s most influential companies, ensuring top-tier mentorship, direction, and vision.
• Frontier AI Applied Research Team: Our researchers operate at the leading edge of agentic AI systems, translating breakthrough capabilities into real-world cybersecurity applications.
• Generous compensation: We offer highly competitive salaries, equity options, and a supportive work environment. Your contributions will be valued and rewarded as we grow together.

About the Role

We are building an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that helps enterprises manage vulnerabilities at scale. Our AI team has delivered real, working products — services that use LLMs for natural language filtering, container image analysis, package standardization, and maintenance assessment. The AI science is strong. Now, the AI team needs dedicated engineering leadership to match.

You will be the technical leader of the AI platform engineering team. This is a hands-on architecture and leadership role. You\'ll set the engineering standards, design the system architecture, establish the testing and deployment practices, and build the team that takes our AI services from "it works" to "it scales, it\'s reliable, it\'s maintainable, and we can ship with confidence."

You\'ll work directly with the Head of AI, the applied AI scientists, and the backend engineering team. You\'ll report to engineering leadership and have a seat at the table for technical strategy decisions. This is not a management role — it\'s a technical leadership role where you write code, review architecture, and mentor engineers while setting the direction for how AI systems get built and operated.

Key Responsibilities

• Audit and roadmap. Assess the current services, architecture, and deployment practices. Produce an engineering roadmap that prioritizes the highest-impact improvements (we\'ll give you a head start — we know where the gaps are).
• Establish engineering foundations. Design and implement the shared library architecture — common patterns for configuration, DB access, error handling, structured logging, and health checks that all services adopt. Define the coding standards, PR review process, and quality gates.
• Build the test infrastructure. Not just write tests but design the testing strategy: how we mock LLM APIs, how we run integration tests against staging, how we measure coverage, and how it all plugs into CI. Set the standard that the team follows.
• Consolidate and fix CI/CD. You\'ll design a parameterized pipeline template, add test and lint stages, and establish the deployment strategy (staging, canary, rollback).
• Fix critical production issues. You\'ll prioritize and address the highest-risk issues while establishing patterns that prevent new ones.
• Own architecture decisions across the AI platform — API contracts, caching strategies, data flow, service boundaries, and technology choices
• Lead the engineering hiring process for the AI team — define the roles, conduct technical interviews, and help build a high-performing team of 3-5 engineers
• Mentor AI scientists on engineering practices — testing, code structure, version control workflows — in a way that improves their code without slowing their research velocity
• Design evaluation and reliability frameworks for LLM-powered features — how we measure accuracy, detect regressions, and monitor production behavior
• Partner with backend engineering to define how AI services integrate with the core cybersecurity platform — API versioning, contract testing, SLAs, and data flow
• Translate business problems into technical architecture — work with product and AI leadership to turn ambiguous requirements into well-scoped engineering work

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or staff+ role where you set standards for a team or organization
• Deep software architecture expertise. You\'ve designed shared libraries, defined API contracts, established coding standards, and made technology decisions that a team lived with for years. You think in terms of patterns, not just solutions
• Production systems ownership at scale. You\'ve been paged at 2am, you\'ve run incident postmortems, you\'ve built the monitoring that catches problems before customers do. You understand what production-grade actually means
• Strong Python expertise with emphasis on clean architecture — dependency injection, proper module boundaries, testable design, async patterns done correctly
• Testing leadership. You haven\'t just written tests — you\ve established testing culture. You\'ve designed test strategies for systems with complex external dependencies
• Cloud platform expertise. Deep experience with Azure (preferred) or AWS/GCP. You\'ve designed and operated containerized microservice architectures in production
• CI/CD and DevOps maturity. You\'ve consolidated messy build pipelines, added quality gates, implemented deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), and established release processes
• Mentorship and technical leadership. You\'ve raised the engineering bar on a team. You\'ve done code reviews that teach, not just gatekeep. You\'ve helped junior and mid-level engineers grow. You can work with AI scientists who are domain experts but still developing engineering practices — and you can do it with empathy and patience
• Excellent communication skills. You\'ll interface with AI scientists, backend engineers, product managers, and executive leadership. You need to translate between these audiences fluently

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with or alongside AI/ML teams — you understand the workflow of AI scientists and how to build infrastructure that serves their needs without constraining their exploration
• Familiarity with LLM provider APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI) and the engineering challenges of LLM integration (prompt management, output parsing, cost optimization, latency)
• Experience with Azure specifically — Cosmos DB, Container Apps, Azure Identity, Azure DevOps
• Background in cybersecurity, vulnerability management, or compliance-sensitive environments (SOC2, data privacy)
• Track record of building engineering teams from early stage — you\'ve been the first senior engineering hire and built the team around you
• Experience with RAG systems, embedding pipelines, vector databases, or LLM evaluation frameworks
• Exposure to MLOps practices — model versioning, experiment tracking, evaluation pipelines (this becomes increasingly relevant as we mature)

Why This Role

• Greenfield engineering leadership. You\'ll design the engineering foundation and set the standards from day one.
• Direct organizational impact. You\'ll build and lead a team, set the technical direction, and shape how AI gets delivered to customers. Your decisions will visibly move the company.
• AI without the hype. We\'re not chasing trends. We\'re building AI systems that solve real cybersecurity problems for real enterprises. You\'ll work with frontier LLMs in a domain that matters.
• Growth into AI/ML leadership. As the platform matures, this role evolves into leading the full AI infrastructure — model serving, evaluation, fine-tuning pipelines, and MLOps. We\'ll invest in your growth alongside the platform.
• Startup impact, real product. We have customers, revenue, and a working product. You\'re not joining to figure out product-market fit — you\'re joining to scale what works.