Principal AI Engineer (Sarasota, FL)

TENEX.AI • Sarasota, FL

66d • Onsite

About The Position

As a Principal AI Engineer at TENEX, you will be a key technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing scalable, high-performance AI systems. You will play a crucial role in shaping the architecture of our AI-driven cybersecurity solutions while mentoring engineering teams and driving technical innovation. Location: This role will require onsite in our Sarasota, FL location.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software development, engineering production systems using modern programming languages (Python, Go, Rust, or Java).
• Deep knowledge of LLM architecture, prompt engineering, and Vector database workflows.
• Hands-on experience building agents, orchestration frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph, Agno AGI, or custom), and evaluation harnesses.
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and event-driven systems.
• Strong fundamentals in API design (REST/gRPC) and distributed systems.
• Clear, concise communication skills and a bias for collaborative problem-solving.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication and leadership abilities.
• Ability to mentor and influence engineering teams.
• Passion for cybersecurity and automation.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Prior work in cybersecurity (SIEM, EDR, SOAR, or MDR).
• Experience with graph databases or security-focused knowledge graphs.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure security (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Background leading teams in high-growth startups or enterprise SaaS.
• Relevant certifications (AWS/GCP Professional Engineer, Kubernetes, or security-related credentials) are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design & build the AI layer that powers autonomous detection, RAG-backed investigation, and auto-remediation workflows.
• Develop and productionize large-scale LLMs, graph-based reasoning engines, and streaming feature pipelines that operate on billions of security events.
• Own evaluation & reliability—from prompt libraries and fine tuning to red-team testing, latency budgets, and fallback strategies.
• Mentor & grow a cohort of AI engineers; run design reviews, uphold code quality, and instill a security-first mindset.
• Partner tightly with Product, Detection Engineering, and Customer Success to translate real-world attacker behavior into robust ML and rule-based detections.
• Push the frontier—experiment with retrieval-augmented generation, tool-calling agents, and multi-modal models (text + logs + graphs) to keep defenders decisively ahead.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• A culture of growth and development, with opportunities to expand your knowledge in AI, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 51-100 employees