Job Summary The Principal AI Engineer will be the founding engineer responsible for building and operating the enterprise AI platform and its first production applications end-to-end. This role sets the engineering standards - repository structure, testing, deployment patterns - that future hires will build upon. It is a principal-scope, hands-on role where you ship code weekly and own it in production.
Key Responsibilities - Bu ild and operate AI environments including the governed enterprise MCP gateway and Azure AI foundation.
- Implement SAP identity passthrough in partnership with IT/SAP teams.
- Own CI/CD pipelines for AI assets, with evaluation and observability harness instrumented from day one.
- Ship production AI use cases including retrieval, grounding, and agentic workflows released behind evaluation gates.
- Co-build with integration partners during initial platform build, internalizing patterns for long-term capability.
- Define engineering standards, tooling, and practices, serving as technical lead as the team grows.
- First 90 Days
- Deliver the MCP gateway carrying production traffic for the first use case in a company-owned Azure environment.
- Establish evaluation scores and telemetry flowing from day-one instrumentation.
- Publish engineering standards for repository structure, testing, and deployment.
Required Qualifications- 10+ years of software engineering experience.
- Strong coding fluency in Python and/or TypeScript.
- Deep Azure expertise: infrastructure-as-code (Bicep/Terraform), networking, identity, container platforms, Azure AI services.
- Hands-on experience building and operating production LLM/agentic systems end-to-end (data flows, orchestration, deployment, evaluation, incident response).
- Expertise in evaluation engineering: designing eval suites, datasets, metrics, regression tests wired into CI/CD.
- Ownership of CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent).
- Identity-aware API and integration design.
- Sound judgment in vendor partnerships while keeping core capability in-house.
- Daily use of AI assistants (Claude, Microsoft Copilot) in development workflows.
Preferred Qualifications - Experience implementing Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Exposure to SAP ERP integration or other enterprise ERP systems.
- Experience with enterprise integration/automation (iPaaS) platforms.
- Prior technical-lead or mentoring experience.
