Principal AI Platform Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI Platform Engineer Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Type: Contract

You are the right fit if you have ● Strong experience in data engineering, data platforms, distributed systems, or enterprise data infrastructure. ● Practical experience building AI-enabled data systems, retrieval systems, semantic layers, or data agents. ● Strong knowledge of SQL, APIs, documents, vector search, knowledge graphs, and metadata systems. ● Experience with agentic interfaces, tool-calling, MCP or similar protocols, function calling, or AI backends. ● Good understanding of governance: access control, policies, contracts, lineage, data quality, PII protection, and auditability. ● Ability to build production systems that are safe, observable, testable, and reliable. ● Strong Python skills and comfort working across backend services, data systems, APIs, and AI frameworks. ● Product-minded judgment: you know the difference between a demo, a customer-specific workaround, and a reusable platform capability. ● Comfort working in ambiguous areas where the patterns are still being defined.

Nice to have ● Experience with data mesh, data products, semantic models, catalogs, governance platforms, or data marketplaces. ● Experience with MCP servers, tool registries, LLM orchestration, RAG systems, or multi-step agents. ● Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Spark, DuckDB, Postgres, graph databases, vector databases, or lakehouse architectures. ● Experience with enterprise identity and authorization systems such as SSO, OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RBAC, ABAC, or policy engines. ● Experience evaluating AI systems for retrieval quality, tool-use accuracy, groundedness, reproducibility, and failure modes.

Pay: $130,000.00 - $150,000.00 per year

Work Location: Hybrid remote in San Francisco, CA 94114