Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems
About The Position
Inflection AI is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and technical direction of its agentic AI systems. The role involves building production AI agents capable of reasoning, retrieving context, using tools, and executing complex workflows safely. The engineer will drive the design of scalable agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, observability, and reliability systems. This position requires close collaboration with product, design, and engineering teams to transform ambiguous problems into AI-native experiences, mentor senior engineers, and establish technical standards for future intelligent agents.
Requirements
- 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years at staff/principal or equivalent scope, and 2+ years building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems used by real customers.
- Strong Python or TypeScript experience.
- Experience building LLM-powered products, AI agents, RAG systems, automation workflows, or model-integrated applications.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including APIs, databases, queues, testing, observability, cloud infrastructure, and deployment.
- Experience with tool/function calling, structured outputs, embeddings, retrieval, prompt design, and model evaluation.
- Strong product judgment and ability to move from ambiguous problem to shipped product quickly.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving environment with ownership, collaboration, and high technical standards.
- Have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements
Nice To Haves
- Experience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, vLLM, or similar tools.
- Experience with agent memory, planning, multi-agent systems, browser automation, workflow automation, or AI copilots.
- Experience building eval pipelines, synthetic test cases, observability, guardrails, or AI safety systems.
- Experience with enterprise SaaS, productivity tools, developer tools, CRM, support, sales, finance, legal, or operations workflows.
- Experience working in early-stage, high-growth, or zero-to-one product environments
Responsibilities
- Build production AI agents that can plan, retrieve context, call tools, take actions, and recover from failures.
- Design agent architectures for task decomposition, tool routing, memory, state management, human approval, and safe execution.
- Create evals and observability systems for multi-step task success, tool-call accuracy, hallucination resistance, latency, cost, and failure modes.
- Integrate agents with APIs, databases, SaaS tools, enterprise systems, internal systems, and user-facing workflows.
- Improve reliability through structured outputs, guardrails, fallback paths, monitoring, permissions, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to turn ambiguous user problems into shipped AI-native features.
- Make pragmatic model and infrastructure choices across proprietary models, open-source models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and cloud environments.
- Contribute to technical direction, engineering best practices, and the quality bar for agentic AI systems.
- Own the technical direction of agentic AI systems, provide support and coaching to the team.
Benefits
- Diverse medical, dental and vision options
- 401k matching program
- Unlimited paid time off
- Parental leave and flexibility for all parents and caregivers
- Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
