Principal AI Engineer

Position Title: Principal AI Engineer

Location: Irvine, California or Anywhere in USA (preferably West Coast based or willing to work in PST Zone)

Salary- $140K-145K/Y

Principal AI Engineer to lead the architecture, strategy, and technical evolution of enterprise scale AI platforms and GenAI powered product experiences.
Key Responsibilities

Define and own enterprise AI platform architecture
Lead development of RAG pipelines and AI orchestration frameworks
Build production grade AI systems and proofs of concept
Establish AI quality, evaluation, and governance standards
Drive AI platform design decisions and reusable tooling

Required Technical Skills
Python engineering expertise
LLM applications, vector databases, retrieval infrastructure LangChain, LlamaIndex, semantic search systems
AI evaluations, model lifecycle management, observability
Scalable GenAI systems and MLOps

Required Leadership Skills

12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant tenure at Staff/Principal level.
Drive cross team technical decisions, platform direction, and multi team initiatives (architecture alignment, trade off resolution, execution).
Define and scale AI driven SDLC standards, including tools, guardrails, and automation patterns.
Hands on experience with AI assisted development (e.g., Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) to deliver production systems; able to articulate workflow impact and guardrails.
Strong experience designing and evolving large scale distributed systems (APIs, data pipelines, event driven systems, high scale platforms).
Proven cross org leadership driving architecture, standards, and platform initiatives across multiple teams.
Elevate engineering quality through code reviews, architecture reviews, and mentoring senior engineers.
Strong engineering fundamentals in code quality, testing, CI/CD, and observability while maintaining delivery velocity.
Effective communicator with the ability to influence stakeholders and drive alignment without formal authority.
Experience collaborating across product, data, security, and infrastructure teams.
Track record of documenting and scaling architectural decisions and organizational learnings.

The pay range for this role is $140K - $145K per year including any bonuses or variable pay. Tech Mahindra also offers benefits like medical, vision, dental, life, disability insurance and paid time off (including holidays, parental leave, and sick leave, as required by law). Ask our recruiters for more details on our Benefits package. The exact offer terms will depend on the skill level, educational qualifications, experience and location of the candidate.

Tech Mahindra is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We promote and support a diverse workforce at all levels of the company. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, or disability. All applicants will be evaluated solely on the basis of their ability, competence, and performance of the essential functions of their positions with or without reasonable accommodations. Reasonable accommodations also are available in the hiring process for applicants with disabilities. Candidates can request a reasonable accommodation by contacting the company ADA Coordinator at ADA_Accomodations@TechMahindra.com.