Senior AI/ML Architecture Lead (Hybrid)

Coupa; Foster City (CA); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Global Wellness Days

BirthdayTime‑Off

VolunteerTimeOff (VTO)

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Business Travel Protection

Referral Bonus Program

Job summary

Coupa seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture to define the technical direction for training, evaluating, and serving models across its AI platform. You will prototype and steer a growing ML/data engineering team, shaping architecture for enterprise spend management in collaboration with product and cloud ops teams.

You will guide ML engineers across the US and India, implement safe AI standards, and influence model deployment choices while hands‑on coding and prototyping in early phases.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on ML/AI systems.
• Experience training or fine‑tuning large language models; shipped a fine‑tuned or domain‑adapted model to production.
• Deep knowledge of transformer architectures, training optimization (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, RLHF, DPO), and inference serving.
• Experience with distributed training on GPU clusters.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, vector search, embedding models, and knowledge graph integration.
• Hands‑on experience with cloud AI/ML services (model hosting, managed training, or equivalent).
• Experience designing and running custom evaluation suites for LLMs.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure tooling.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture for model training, evaluation, and serving across Coupa's AI platform.
• Evaluate and select model approaches (open-weight, commercial, and hybrid) against enterprise accuracy and cost requirements.
• Design evaluation frameworks that measure model quality on Coupa's specific task categories.
• Drive technical partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providers.
• Architect training data pipelines, including synthetic data generation and quality validation.
• Design retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems that extend our existing RAG infrastructure with structured knowledge retrieval.
• Establish technical standards for model safety, tenant data isolation, and responsible AI.
• Write code, review PRs, and prototype approaches, especially in the early phases.
• Mentor and guide ML and data engineers across US and India.
• Collaborate with product, existing AI platform, and cloud operations teams.

Skills

Software engineering

ML/AI systems

LLM fine-tuning

Transformer architectures

Distributed training on GPUs

RAG architectures

Vector search

Python

PyTorch

ML infrastructure tooling

Cloud AI/ML services

LLM evaluation suites

Advanced degree

Enterprise SaaS

Education

Advanced degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

Tools

GPU clusters

Job description

Coupa seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture to define the technical direction for training, evaluating, and serving models across its AI platform. You will prototype and steer a growing ML/data engineering team, shaping architecture for enterprise spend management in collaboration with product and cloud ops teams.

You will guide ML engineers across the US and India, implement safe AI standards, and influence model deployment choices while hands‑on coding and prototyping in early phases.