# Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform

**Company:** [Redpanda Data](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/redpanda-data)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $245k – $290k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Go, Distributed Systems, Streaming Data, Apache Kafka, Access Control, Policy Enforcement, Ai Orchestration, Multi-Agent Systems, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Protocol Buffers, Postgres
**Posted:** 2026-04-29

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

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