Principal Engineer, Applied AI & Build Standards

Best Buy • Richfield, MN

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

As Principal Engineer on Best Buy’s Applied AI & Build Standards team, you will set technical direction for AI Rails, the shared platform and build standards that enable thousands of Best Buy engineers and technologists to use AI agents with appropriate access, security, and cost controls. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with no direct reports; you will lead through technical authority and code. The role is hybrid: onsite Monday through Thursday at Best Buy’s corporate office in Richfield, Minnesota, and virtual from home or another non-Best Buy location on Friday. The role is eligible for immigration sponsorship.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of hands-on software engineering experience with a bachelor’s degree, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• Experience setting technical direction for a shared platform used by many engineering teams, such as an API gateway or developer platform.
• Recent hands-on experience, within the last two years, building LLM-based agent systems beyond a prototype, including tool calling, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Experience securing software that acts on a user’s behalf, including authentication, authorization, least-privilege access, and audit logging.
• Experience leading technical decisions across teams without direct authority and explaining trade-offs in writing to senior leaders.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding agents in designing, building, and reviewing code.

Nice To Haves

• At least 9 years of relevant professional experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience taking an internal platform from pilot to production at scale, with quantified results such as usage or cost per task.
• Experience with production runtime controls for AI agents, including policy gateways, human approval for high-risk actions, kill switches, and immutable audit logs.
• Experience taking AI capabilities through security, risk, and compliance review in a large or regulated enterprise.
• Hands-on MCP experience with servers, gateways, and tool discovery, and context engineering for accurate, current, permission-aware company data for agents.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform’s reference architecture and roadmap, including the agent harness, MCP gateway, durable execution, model routing, and cost attribution.
• Recommend build-versus-buy decisions for core components and lead their evaluation, decision, and rollout.
• Define the AI-agent trust model, including risk tiers, approval gates for high-risk actions, kill switches, and audit logs tied to a person.
• Set engineering standards, including stage-specific definitions of done, evaluation-gated releases, and approval of new models.
• Give senior leaders a risk-calibrated view of agent safety and match controls to the cost of mistakes.
• Coach engineers across teams through design reviews, RFCs, and office hours, and bring the technical perspective to AI governance.
• Use agentic AI as a core development and coding tool.

Benefits

• Competitive pay.
• Great employee discount.
• Financial savings and retirement resources.
• Support for physical and mental well-being.
• Leaves of absence, subject to eligibility and applicable conditions.
• Paid time off for full-time and part-time employees, subject to work location, employment status, salary or hourly status, and years of service.
• Certain roles may be eligible for incentive pay, subject to eligibility.

What This Job Offers

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