Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform
Principal engineer architecting and building Redpanda's Agentic Data Plane, enabling AI agents to safely interact with enterprise data via streaming, query, and governance layers. Requires 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems and experience with agentic AI infrastructure.
About the job
You Will
- Track emerging research, frameworks, and industry developments in the agentic AI space, and translate the most relevant signals into concrete engineering proposals and product bets
- Identify, prototype, and deliver high-leverage emerging capabilities for ADP, in partnership with the broader team
- Define architectural patterns for new ADP capabilities, ensuring they integrate cleanly with the existing runtime, policy, and observability layers
- Engage directly with strategic customers and the field to stress-test new capabilities against real enterprise deployment scenarios
- Serve as a technical ambassador for ADP externally, publishing research, writing engineering blog posts, and speaking at conferences to establish Redpanda's credibility at the frontier of agentic infrastructure
- Participate in on-call and help drive down operational toil, improving system observability and self-healing capabilities over time
You Have
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of leading the design and delivery of complex, large-scale distributed systems
- Experience building or contributing to emerging areas of agentic AI infrastructure, e.g. eval frameworks, orchestration layers, context management, AI gateways, or similar
- Fluency with AI-assisted development at the level of agentic orchestration, i.e. composing multi-agent coding workflows with subagents to dramatically accelerate research and prototyping
- Deep expertise in at least one systems language (Go preferred) and comfort working across the stack
- Understanding of streaming data systems, messaging infrastructure, or data plane/control plane architectures, experience with Apache Kafka or Redpanda is a plus
- Experience designing and operating systems that enforce access control, policy, and auditability at scale
- Self-directed, strong written communicator, comfortable collaborating asynchronously in GitHub, Slack, and Google Docs
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. Able to lead without authority across engineering teams and engage credibly with technical customers and external audiences
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with AI safety, alignment, or responsible AI research as it applies to autonomous systems in enterprise environments
- Experience with protocol buffers, protoreflect and codegen
- Background in security, identity, or data governance systems relevant to enterprise environments
- Experience running Kafka/Redpanda and/or Postgres at scale
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Prior experience in an early-stage or growth-stage startup, especially in a category-defining product area
Compensation
- U.S. base salary range for this role is $245,000 - $290,000. Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location.
Skills
Go, Distributed Systems, Streaming Data, Apache Kafka, Access Control, Policy Enforcement, Ai Orchestration, Multi-Agent Systems, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Protocol Buffers, Postgres
Similar jobs
ML Engineering jobs
San Francisco, CA
Principal technical leader defining architecture and multi-year strategy for Pinterest’s Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant experiences. The role requires 15+ years of large-scale systems or machine-learning experience, deep expertise in discovery and generative AI, and hands-on leadership across engineering and product organizations.
Rula
United States
Own the architecture and delivery of production AI systems for patient-provider matching, search relevance, personalization, clinical workflows, and engagement. The role requires extensive software engineering, distributed systems, search or recommendation, ML applications, and foundation-model experience in a regulated healthcare setting.
PointClickCare
United States
Leads the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for a company-wide ML platform supporting model development, deployment, serving, and monitoring. The role requires principal-level expertise in Python and Java, scalable MLOps, cloud infrastructure, security, and technical leadership across teams.
Zoox
Foster City, CA
Leads the technical strategy and engineering execution required to achieve driverless freeway operation for autonomous vehicles. Requires 10+ years of software experience, demonstrated freeway autonomy leadership, deep expertise in an autonomy domain, and strong executive communication skills.
Fetch
United States
Design and scale ML infrastructure and real-time learning systems powering personalization, search, ranking, and ad tech for millions of consumers. The role requires deep distributed-systems and data-pipeline expertise, strong architecture leadership, and experience delivering zero-to-one ML systems.