Principal AI Engineer

IHG•Atlanta, GA

4d•$180,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

A Principal AI Engineer serves as the foremost technical authority and strategic leader for our AI discipline. This is role is an engineer who combines profound technical expertise with the ability to influence and guide the entire organization's technical direction. The Principal AI Engineer will be entrusted with our most complex, ambiguous, and highest-impact technical challenges. You will operate across multiple teams and business units, setting the long-term vision for our AI architecture, platforms, and practices. You will be a force-multiplier, mentoring our most senior technical talent and ensuring that the solutions we build today are the foundation for our market leadership tomorrow.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant field of work or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
Typically, a minimum of 10+ years of progressive work-related experience with demonstrated proficiency in multiple disciplines, technologies, or processes related to the position.
Experience working with a set of geographically dispersed team and bringing a holistic view of development projects.
A distinguished career with extensive experience in software engineering and AI, with a proven track record of operating at a Principal or equivalent level (e.g., Senior/Lead Staff Engineer, Architect).
Recognized as a technical leader with experience setting the technical vision for multiple teams or an entire engineering department.
Verifiable history of architecting, building, and shipping large-scale, mission-critical AI systems that have delivered significant business impact.
Deep experience navigating ambiguity and translating high-level business or product strategy into a concrete, multi-year technical roadmap.
Experience presenting to and influencing executive leadership (VPs, CTO, CPO) on complex technical topics.
Expert understanding of modern AI concepts, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic workflows.
Deep, authoritative knowledge of major generative AI platforms. Proven ability to reason about and architect solutions using the Google Gemini family of models and their underlying infrastructure is highly preferred.
Expert-level proficiency in Python and common AI/ML libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, Hugging Face).
Expert experience with a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure), including their AI/ML services. Familiarity with MLOps principles and tools for CI/CD, model deployment, and monitoring.
Solid understanding of microservices architecture, API design (e.g., REST, gRPC), and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
World-class ability to design highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and elegant distributed systems. You don't just use the cloud; you architect for it.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
Ability to display effective verbal and written communication skills when explaining complex technical issues to a variety of technical audiences, including clients, vendors, senior management and staff.
Ability to establish and maintain a high level of customer trust and confidence in the software engineering team’s knowledge of the customer’s business needs.
Understands and implements work effectively utilizing agile best practices.

Nice To Haves

A history of contributions to open-source projects, publications in reputable conferences, or speaking at technical events is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for AI at the company.
Identify and champion new technological paradigms that create step-change opportunities and sustainable competitive advantages.
Design, and prototype foundational AI platforms, frameworks, and core services that will be leveraged by engineering teams across the entire organization. Your designs will set the standard for scalability, security, and innovation.
Act as the lead technical consultant on AI for all product and engineering teams. Influence architectural decisions, development practices, and technology choices to ensure a cohesive and forward-looking technical ecosystem.
Tackle the most complex and mission-critical technical problems that are beyond the scope of a single team. This includes pioneering new model architectures, solving novel systems-level problems, and leading high-risk, high-reward R&D initiatives.
Act as a dedicated mentor and role model for our Lead and Senior engineers. Grow the next generation of technical leaders by elevating the architectural and design skills across the company.
Establish and evangelize best practices, design patterns, and engineering standards for AI development, from model training and deployment to ethics and reliability.