Principal Engineer, Agentic AI

VF Corporation • Greensboro, NC

2d • $159,840 - $199,800

About The Position

The Principal Agentic AI Engineer is a hands-on technical leader embedded in VF Corporation’s centralized Agentic AI team. This team operates as a cross-brand, cross-region Center of Excellence that builds and deploys AI agents for every brand in VF’s portfolio and every function in VF’s enterprise. This role carries a dual mandate that is critical to VF’s agentic AI strategy: 1. Own the pro-code development of production-grade agentic AI, building custom agents, multi-agent orchestration, complex integrations, and bespoke solutions that require deep engineering expertise. 2. Evangelize and enable low-code development across brand and business functions, empowering citizen developers to build, extend, and maintain their own agents while establishing the guardrails, patterns, templates, and governance that make decentralized agent creation safe and effective. You are the engineer who builds the hardest agents yourself and makes it possible for everyone else at VF to build the rest. You set the architectural patterns, create the reusable components, establish the integration connectors, and define the quality standards that the entire VF organization inherits.

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.

Nice To Haves

• Masters preferred.
• 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 that require deep engineering expertise.
• Evangelize and enable low-code development across brand and business functions, empowering citizen developers to build, extend, and maintain their own agents while establishing the guardrails, patterns, templates, and governance that make decentralized agent creation safe and effective.
• 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: 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 where agents that outgrow Copilot Studio’s capabilities.
• 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 and 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 -providing VF’s Agentic AI team with real-time visibility into performance, cost, error rates, and impact.
• 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.
• Design and deliver training for Copilot Studio, structured in tiers: Foundational (business analysts building first agents), Intermediate (power users adding custom connectors and knowledge sources), and Advanced (technical builders using MCP, HITL, and multi-agent patterns).
• Build and publish VF’s “Agent Developer Guide” and an agent template gallery - a curated library of pre-built, governance-approved agent design patterns, connector libraries, governance requirements, testing standards, and deployment checklists.
• Track and govern developer adoption metrics: count, usage, business value delivered by decentralized agents, and quality/governance compliance rates—demonstrating the ROI.
• Identify when citizen-built agents are hitting the ceiling of low-code capabilities and transition them to pro-code solutions, either by extending with custom connectors or migrating to Azure AI Foundry.
• Design the integration layer between VF’s agent platforms and enterprise systems of record using custom connectors, APIs, MCP servers, and event-driven architectures.
• Architect secure, performant RAG pipelines that ground VF’s agents in enterprise knowledge with proper chunking, embedding, indexing, and retrieval strategies.
• Establish VF’s standards for agent memory, state management, and context handling across both short-lived conversational interactions and long-running autonomous workflows.
• 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 and develop custom connectors and MCP servers that expose VF’s enterprise systems to agents.
• Implement comprehensive agent testing: unit tests for tool functions, integration tests for system connectors, evaluation tests using LLM-as-judge and human review, and performance testing.
• Define and enforce VF’s agent quality standards across both pro-code and citizen-built agents: accuracy, hallucination tolerance, response SLAs, cost, and brand voice.
• Implement governance automation for Copilot Studio: DLP policies, Entra Agent ID enforcement, environment controls, agent publishing approval workflows, and automated compliance scanning.
• Build VF’s agent observability stack: dashboards showing agent health, usage, cost, quality scores, escalation rates, and business impact across all brands and functions
• Own incident response for production agent issues: rapid diagnosis, remediation, root cause analysis, and post-incident improvements.

Benefits

• Annual incentive plan
• Sales incentive
• Commission potential

What This Job Offers

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