Principal AI Engineer

Principal AI Engineer - Generative AI

We're looking for a highly experienced and innovative Principal AI Engineer to drive the development and adoption of our LLM Platform and Generative AI initiatives. Innovation is at the core of this role — you will be expected to continuously push boundaries, experiment with emerging AI techniques, and translate cutting-edge research into production systems. You will architect scalable AI platforms, shape our engineering strategy, and provide expert guidance across cross-functional teams.

In this role you will:

• Hands-on Development: Design, build, and test core LLM platform components, Generative AI agents, and supporting tooling in Java — ensuring production-grade quality, performance, and reliability.
• Architecture & System Design: Lead the design and implementation of robust, scalable systems for LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, agent workflows (Google ADK), fine-tuning, model serving, and API development on AWS.
• RAG & Knowledge Systems: Architect and own Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems end-to-end — embedding pipelines, vector store selection and tuning, chunking strategies, retrieval evaluation, and integration with generative models.
• Agent Engineering: Build and evolve multi-agent systems using Google Agent Development Kit (ADK), defining patterns for tool use, memory, orchestration, and inter-agent communication.
• Innovation & Research: Actively track and evaluate emerging Generative AI research, frameworks, and tools. Prototype novel ideas, run experiments, and champion the adoption of techniques that create competitive advantage.
• Performance & Evaluation: Define evaluation metrics and conduct rigorous assessments of Generative AI and RAG solutions to ensure business impact and continuous improvement.
• Mentorship: Mentor and inspire junior and mid-level engineers — through code reviews, pairing sessions, design guidance, and deliberate investment in their growth. Foster a culture of curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Cross-Team Guidance: Serve as the subject matter expert for multiple teams building Generative AI features — content generation, code assistance, customer support automation, data augmentation, and more.

You've Got What It Takes If You Have...

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on AI/ML systems, including 3+ years hands-on with LLMs and Generative AI in production.
• Deep expertise in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — including vector databases, embedding models, hybrid search, and evaluation frameworks.
• Proven track record designing and shipping complex, high-scale AI systems on AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock, Lambda, ECS, etc.); GCP experience a plus.
• Strong Java engineering skills; experience building production AI services and APIs in the JVM ecosystem.
• Hands-on experience with Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) or comparable agentic frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, etc.).
• Demonstrated passion for innovation — a track record of introducing new ideas, not just executing on existing ones.
• Experience mentoring engineers at various levels and contributing to team capability growth.
• Solid understanding of data governance, privacy, and responsible AI principles as applied to LLM systems.
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate complex AI/engineering concepts for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

#LI-Onsite

Our Culture:

Our mission is to empower people, businesses and communities. A culture created less by what we do and more by who we are. When people ask what our team is about, we point to our core values: champion customer success, bring our best, achieve together, get stuff done, and innovate every day. We're always on the lookout for new, curious and capable people who can help us achieve our goal and we are seeking diversity in the people who join our team. We want to make sure that our company reflects the demographic of our customers, clients, and the communities in which we operate. So if you want to work for a friendly, global, inclusive and innovative company, we'd love to meet you! 

What We Do:

Cornerstone is a premier people development company. We believe people can achieve anything when they have the right development and growth opportunities. We offer organizations the technology, content, expertise and specialized focus to help them realize the potential of their people. Featuring comprehensive recruiting, personalized learning, modern training content, development-driven performance management and holistic employee data management and insights, Cornerstone’s people development solutions are successfully used by more than 100 million+ people in 180+ countries and in nearly 50 languages.

Cornerstone takes special care to ensure the security and privacy of the data of its users.

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