Principal AI Systems Engineer — C++ / Applied AI
$190,200–$360,500 year
RemoteChicago, Illinois, United States or New York City, New York, United States
Job Summary
Principal AI Systems Engineer role focusing on AI-native C++ infrastructure and production-grade AI systems. Responsibilities include architecture design and building native C++ infrastructure that connects product code to AI-powered services and model-backed workflows, defining interfaces and guardrails, ensuring safe and observable AI actions within production software, guiding long-term architecture via ADRs and design reviews, developing cross-platform client-side infrastructure (connectivity, TLS, concurrency, async execution), improving code health through modernization and testing, and leading cross-functional teams to deliver reliable AI capabilities. The role spans AI reliability, evaluation frameworks, and technical leadership across product, data science, security, and governance teams.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in C++
- Strong experience building or maintaining large, mature, performance-sensitive codebases
- Hands-on experience integrating AI, LLMs, agents, or model-backed systems into production or production-adjacent software
- Experience with testing at scale (unit, integration, CI, regression)
- Strong systems architecture skills and ability to lead across multiple teams
- Experience with cross-platform development (Windows, macOS, Linux)
- Experience with modern C++ design, memory management, concurrency, API design, debugging
- Familiarity with JSON-RPC, gRPC, WebSockets, REST
- Experience designing tool/function-calling interfaces, agentic workflows, or AI orchestration systems
- Preferred: frontier model APIs (GPT, Claude, Gemini) and AI evaluation frameworks
- Background in enterprise software or developer tools
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