Principal AI Platform Engineer

MaintainX • San Francisco, CA

2d • Remote

About The Position

MaintainX is the world's leading mobile-first work execution platform for industrial and frontline teams. The company is at a turning point, with the market expecting to fill 3.8 million vacant jobs through 2033 and manufacturers anticipating AI-driven maintenance adoption by 2027. MaintainX's AI Platform is crucial for this transition, enabling AI-powered features across its products. The Principal AI Platform Engineer will own the technical vision for this platform, scaling it to meet the company's ambitions. This senior individual contributor role reports to the VP of Engineering and will lead through architecture, high-leverage technical decisions, and product development that drives long-term company outcomes. The role involves setting direction across multiple divisions, aligning executives on platform strategy, and ensuring engineering-wide adoption.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems, distributed architecture, or platform / infrastructure engineering.
• 3+ years building ML or LLM-powered systems in production, with real operating experience around evaluation, latency, cost, and reliability.
• A track record of company-wide technical leadership at the Principal level, including defining architecture for systems used by multiple teams, influencing engineering strategy beyond a single division, and holding leaders accountable for adoption.
• Internal platform experience where customers are other engineers, with a focus on developer experience (adoption, documentation, enablement, ergonomics).
• Strong Python backend expertise, with experience designing APIs, services, and data pipelines.
• The ability to write a clear design document, facilitate technical decisions across teams, and represent engineering externally with credibility.

Nice To Haves

• Production agentic systems: multi-agent orchestration, tool use, skill registries.
• Experience with MCP, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, and evaluation/observability platforms like Langfuse, LangSmith, or Braintrust.
• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, embedding strategies, and knowledge graphs at scale.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, industrial software, IoT / OT, or other domains where AI must operate with high reliability and domain-specific context.

Responsibilities

• Define the Agent / Skill / Tool architecture, evolving the platform to enable agents to reason, plan, and collaborate, ensuring skills are discoverable and reusable, and tools provide structured, permission-aware access to operational data. Design for progressive autonomy as trust, reliability, and governance mature.
• Scale the context graph by architecting retrieval and knowledge systems that transform extensive data (equipment manuals, procedures, work orders) into customer-specific intelligence with cross-asset reasoning.
• Build the developer experience, owning agent orchestration, an MCP tool registry, reproducible dev environments, and the observability layer to ensure agent trustworthiness at scale. Enable engineers to define agent behavior through schemas and prompts, with the platform handling routing, validation, evaluation, and observability.
• Build the evaluation and feedback loop, designing offline and online evaluation systems to improve agent performance based on user interactions.
• Drive cross-division alignment by partnering with product engineering teams across various departments (Plant Setup, Maintenance Planning, Maintenance Execution, Reliability Engineering, Parts & Purchasing, Reporting).
• Represent MaintainX engineering internally and externally.

Benefits

• Competitive base, equity, and variable comp aligned to role and location.
• Equity in a high-growth, post-Series D company.
• Day-1 health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Unlimited PTO, which we actually take.
• Flexible token limits.
• Work from our San Francisco, Toronto, or Montreal hubs, or remote across the United States and Canada.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed