Principal AI Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer
Work Location: Columbus, Ohio Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH
Contract Duration: 6–12 Months
Work Arrangement: Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH (~10%, quarterly)
Job Description:
You'll be the founding engineer, building and operating the AI platform and the first production applications on it — end to end, from infrastructure and orchestration through evaluation and monitoring.
This is a principal-scope, hands-on role where you will ship code every week and own it in production.
What You'll Do:
Build and operate the governed enterprise MCP gateway and Azure AI environments.
Implement SAP identity passthrough in partnership with the IT/SAP organization.
Own CI/CD for AI assets, evaluation, observability, and cost/usage telemetry.
Ship the first production AI use case and prioritized portfolio including retrieval, grounding, and agentic workflows.
Co-build with an enterprise integration partner while keeping core capabilities in-house.
Define engineering standards, tooling, and practices and serve as a technical lead as the team grows.
Required Qualifications:
10+ years of software engineering experience.
Strong Python and/or TypeScript skills.
Deep Azure expertise including infrastructure-as-code (Bicep or Terraform), networking, identity, container platforms, and Azure AI services.
Production experience building and running LLM or agentic systems end to end.
Experience with evaluation engineering, including datasets, metrics, regression tests, and CI release gates.
Experience owning CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
Strong identity-aware API and integration design experience.
Experience partnering with vendors while keeping core capabilities in-house.
AI-augmented development using tools such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot.
Preferred Qualifications:
Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation experience.
SAP or enterprise ERP integration experience.
Enterprise integration/automation (iPaaS) experience.
Technical leadership or mentoring experience.
Experience in regulated or industrial-sector environments.

Work arrangement
No