AI Principal Engineer| Hybrid: Chicago, IL or NYC, NY

Circana Careers•Chicago, IL

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. AI Principal Engineers build the foundations of that ecosystem. Leading a team, a principal designs and builds the platforms everything else runs on: Circana's agent platform, and a software factory where agents build, test, and ship software while people set intent and approve what goes live. Principals set the patterns and standards other teams build on, own the hardest technical problems, and are the engineers other senior engineers turn to. When a critical initiative needs it, a principal also leads from the front: embedded with a business team for a defined push, working alongside Forward Deployed Engineers, then folding what they learned back into the platform.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience, including designing and owning a platform or shared system used by many teams, and setting technical standards that other senior engineers adopted.
Has built platform infrastructure end to end: runtime and deployment, identity and access, multi-tenant services, and observability.
A strong track record of designing and shipping agentic systems into production for real users.
Deep production fluency with at least one major agent orchestration framework: Google ADK, LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Claude Agent SDK, or similar.
Production experience across multiple model families, with clear judgment on when to reach for which.
Production experience on at least one major cloud AI stack.
Integration depth: has connected platforms to enterprise systems of record, including legacy ones.
Command of the agentic development lifecycle: specs as source of truth, evals as continuous integration, prompt and tool versioning, trace-driven debugging, and sandboxed execution of agentic workloads at scale.
Daily fluency with agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.
Communication that lands at every altitude: engineers, domain experts, and senior executives alike.

Nice To Haves

Has built or led AI-driven software delivery: coding agents in CI, automated review, spec-to-deploy pipelines, developer platforms.
Prior forward deployed or field engineering experience at an AI or data company.
Public artifacts: talks, open source, technical writing.
Consumer goods, retail, or large-scale measurement data background.

Responsibilities

Design and build Circana's agent platform and the ecosystem around it: runtime, agent identity and access, tool and MCP registries, context and memory services, evaluation, observability, and deployment.
Build a dark software factory: largely autonomous pipelines in which agents turn specs into tested, reviewed, and deployed software, with humans setting intent and approving releases.
Lead a team of engineers building these systems: set technical direction, review the work, mentor, and raise the bar.
Own harness engineering: context management, tool contracts and MCP servers, guardrails, retries and graceful degradation, tracing and replay.
Establish evaluation as infrastructure: golden traces, regression suites, routing tests, offline and online measurement, and release gates.
Own the shared patterns, services, and conventions other teams build on, so every build is faster than the last.
Lead embedded engagements when needed, for example a 90-day push with a business team to take an entire workflow agentic, and turn what worked into platform capability.
Represent the work credibly to product owners, architects, security, executives, and client stakeholders.