Principal Engineer, Agentic AI

VF Corporation • Greensboro, CO

3d

About The Position

VF Corporation is seeking a Principal Agentic AI Engineer to join its centralized Agentic AI team, operating as a Center of Excellence. This role involves both hands-on development of production-grade AI agents and enabling citizen developers through low-code platforms. The engineer will set architectural patterns, create reusable components, establish integration connectors, and define quality standards for the organization. The role utilizes a platform polyglot approach, leveraging Microsoft Copilot Studio for enterprise productivity and Azure AI Foundry for custom builds, with a strong emphasis on governance by design to ensure scalable and safe innovation.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience (Senior) or 12+ years (Principal), with at least 2 years focused on AI/ML systems, conversational AI, or agentic AI platforms.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Copilot Studio, including both low-code authoring (topics, knowledge, actions, agent flows) and pro-code extension (custom connectors, Power Platform components, ALM).
• Strong production experience with Azure AI Foundry (Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Prompt Flow, Semantic Kernel, Azure AI Agent Service) building custom agentic applications.
• Proficiency in at least two additional agent frameworks beyond the Microsoft ecosystem: LangChain/LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or comparable orchestration frameworks.
• Deep understanding of agentic AI patterns: multi-agent orchestration, tool-use and function calling, RAG architectures, embedding strategies, evaluation methodologies guardrails, and MCP.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: TypeScript, Python, or C#; RESTful and GraphQL API design; event-driven architectures; CI/CD; infrastructure-as-code (Bicep, Terraform); containerization.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to present to both engineering peers and business leaders, translating technical concepts into business-relevant language.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field. Masters preferred.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Sierra AI or comparable AI platforms for consumer-facing customer service agents.
• Background in Power Platform administration, governance, and toolkit deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own the pro-code development of production-grade agentic AI, building custom agents, multi-agent orchestration, complex integrations, and bespoke solutions.
• Evangelize and enable low-code development across brand and business functions, empowering citizen developers.
• Establish guardrails, patterns, templates, and governance for decentralized agent creation.
• Set architectural patterns, create reusable components, establish integration connectors, and define quality standards.
• Own the pro-code extension layer for Copilot Studio, building custom connectors, developing Power Platform dataflows and custom actions, and creating reusable component libraries.
• Implement advanced Copilot Studio capabilities: multi-agent orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration, human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval workflows, and Copilot Tuning.
• Build and enforce governance standards for Copilot Studio: lifecycle management, naming conventions, environment management, DLP policies, Entra Agent ID configuration, telemetry and analytics, and cost tracking.
• Develop the integration between Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, creating seamless upgrade paths.
• Architect and build production-grade custom agentic applications on Azure AI Foundry using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Agent Service, Prompt Flow, and Semantic Kernel.
• Build and maintain VF’s custom RAG pipelines and vector databases.
• Develop agent evaluation and testing infrastructure on Azure: building task-specific benchmarks, LLM-as-judge evaluation pipelines, red-team testing harnesses, and regression test suites.
• Implement agent observability, tracing, monitoring, Application Insights, and custom telemetry.
• Contribute to VF’s responsible AI practices by implementing guardrails, content safety filters, PII detection and masking, prompt injection defenses, and bias mitigation across all Azure AI Foundry applications.
• Design and deliver training for Copilot Studio for different user tiers.
• Build and publish VF’s “Agent Developer Guide” and an agent template gallery.
• Track and govern developer adoption metrics for decentralized agents.
• Identify when citizen-built agents need to transition to pro-code solutions.
• Design the integration layer between VF’s agent platforms and enterprise systems of record.
• Architect secure, performant RAG pipelines that ground VF’s agents in enterprise knowledge.
• Establish VF’s standards for agent memory, state management, and context handling.
• Write production-quality code (TypeScript, Python, C#) for custom agents, orchestration logic, tool integrations, evaluation pipelines, and deployment automation on Azure AI Foundry.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for agent development across both Copilot Studio and AI Foundry.
• Develop custom connectors and MCP servers that expose VF’s enterprise systems to agents.
• Implement comprehensive agent testing: unit tests, integration tests, evaluation tests, and performance testing.
• Define and enforce VF’s agent quality standards.
• Implement governance automation for Copilot Studio.
• Build VF’s agent observability stack.
• Own incident response for production agent issues.

Benefits

• General overview of each benefit program offered, including this year's medical plan rates on www.MyVFbenefits.com
• Additional compensation awards that may include an annual incentive plan, sales incentive, or commission potential.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal