Principal Engineer, Software Development Engineering (Apps)

Sandisk • Milpitas, CA

18h • $142,080 - $235,359 • Onsite

About The Position

Sandisk is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as an architect for their Enterprise AI platform for engineering workflows. This role involves partnering with the existing platform architect to set technical direction across Nexus's hybrid on-prem and cloud architecture, leading design for agentic systems, MCP ecosystem, LLM gateway, memory and knowledge layers, and ensuring the platform scales securely and reliably as adoption grows across FPG.

Requirements

• Master's or PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years in architecture or technical leadership roles, with demonstrated impact designing and operating large-scale AI/ML, platform, or distributed systems in production.
• Deep proficiency in Python; strong working knowledge of TypeScript/JavaScript, React, and at least one systems language (Go, Java, or C++).
• Expert-level understanding of modern AI/ML stacks: LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and the Hugging Face ecosystem.
• Strong grasp of LLM internals, transformers, embeddings, RAG architectures, fine-tuning approaches, and evaluation methodologies.
• Production experience with LLM providers and gateways (Anthropic, OpenAI or equivalent), and deep familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic design patterns.
• Proven ability to design distributed systems, microservices, REST/GraphQL APIs, event-driven architectures, and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and operating workloads in hybrid on-prem and cloud topologies.
• Working knowledge of relational (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, Elasticsearch), in-memory (Redis / Valkey), and vector databases, with judgment on when to use each.
• Solid background in enterprise security and identity: OAuth, OIDC, SSO, RBAC, secrets management, and data governance.

Nice To Haves

• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence engineering, product, and executive audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across organizational boundaries and align diverse stakeholders behind a technical direction.
• Strong product sense and pragmatic judgment on tradeoffs between speed, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and elevating overall team capability.
• Exceptional ability to decompose ambiguous, large-scale problems, design pragmatic architectures, and debug complex issues across the AI/ML and infrastructure stack.

Responsibilities

• Co-own end-to-end architecture for the Nexus platform across hybrid on-prem and cloud environments.
• Drive design decisions for agentic orchestration, MCP ecosystem, LLM gateway, memory and knowledge systems, observability, and platform applications.
• Define multi-quarter technical direction in partnership with engineering leadership.
• Translate platform vision into actionable architecture roadmaps that balance velocity, scalability, security, and operational maturity.
• Architect production-grade agentic workflows using LangGraph, Deep Agents, and modern agent frameworks.
• Establish patterns for tool use, multi-agent coordination, evaluation, and safety.
• Establish and evolve standards for service design, API contracts, security, identity, observability, and developer experience across Nexus components and purpose-built applications.
• Partner with InfoSec, Cloud Infrastructure, IAM, Networking, and product engineering teams.
• Lead architecture reviews, represent the platform in enterprise architecture forums, and shepherd designs through governance processes (ISAR, STARC, CAB).
• Coach Staff and Senior engineers on system design, distributed systems, AI engineering, and production excellence.
• Raise the technical bar across the team through design reviews, code reviews, and architecture deep dives.
• Identify architectural risks early, drive remediation, and lead the platform's evolution toward stronger environment separation, observability, and incident response maturity.
• Track advances in LLMs, agentic frameworks, and AI infrastructure.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and lead targeted POCs that translate into platform capabilities.

Benefits

• paid vacation time
• paid sick leave
• medical/dental/vision insurance
• life, accident and disability insurance
• tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
• employee assistance program
• other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
• tuition reimbursement
• transit
• the Applause Program
• employee stock purchase plan
• Sandisk's Savings 401(k) Plan
• Short-Term Incentive (STI) Plan
• annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program (restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents)
• RSU awards for eligible new hires

What This Job Offers

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