Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems
Palo Alto, California, United States
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
Palo Alto, California, United States
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Agent Engineer
About the job
Inflection AI is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and technical direction of its agentic AI systems. This role involves building production AI agents capable of reasoning, retrieving context, utilizing tools, and safely executing complex workflows. You will drive the design of scalable agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, observability, and reliability systems. Collaborating closely with product, design, and engineering teams, you will transform ambiguous problems into AI-native experiences, mentor senior engineers, and establish technical standards for the next generation of intelligent agents.
Responsibilities
- Build production AI agents that can plan, retrieve context, call tools, take actions, and recover from failures.
- Design agent architectures for task decomposition, tool routing, memory, state management, human approval, and safe execution.
- Create evaluation and observability systems for multi-step task success, tool-call accuracy, hallucination resistance, latency, cost, and failure modes.
- Integrate agents with APIs, databases, SaaS tools, enterprise systems, internal systems, and user-facing workflows.
- Improve reliability through structured outputs, guardrails, fallback paths, monitoring, permissions, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to turn ambiguous user problems into shipped AI-native features.
- Make pragmatic model and infrastructure choices across proprietary models, open-source models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and cloud environments.
- Contribute to technical direction, engineering best practices, and the quality bar for agentic AI systems.
- Own the technical direction of agentic AI systems, provide support and coaching to the team.
Requirements
- 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years at staff/principal or equivalent scope.
- 2+ years building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems used by real customers.
- Strong Python or TypeScript experience.
- Experience building LLM-powered products, AI agents, RAG systems, automation workflows, or model-integrated applications.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including APIs, databases, queues, testing, observability, cloud infrastructure, and deployment.
- Experience with tool/function calling, structured outputs, embeddings, retrieval, prompt design, and model evaluation.
- Strong product judgment and ability to move from ambiguous problem to shipped product quickly.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving environment with ownership, collaboration, and high technical standards.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field.
Benefits
- Meaningful equity component
- Robust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA
- 401k matching program
- Flexible Time Off
- 10 paid holidays
- 5 days sick leave
- Parental, Medical and Family care leave
- Generous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends
- Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area