Principal AI Engineer, Agentic Systems

Description

This principal-level role centres on agentic AI: you will own the design, build and scaling of AI-powered applications, intelligent tooling and agents that improve how the company runs.

You will work with business and technology leaders to find high-value problems, turn them into production-ready AI solutions, and drive adoption of tools that make work more efficient, support decisions and simplify complex processes.

The company makes athletic apparel with a casual look meant to be worn beyond the gym. Its style draws on an active coastal California lifestyle that blends fitness, creative expression and everyday life, and it runs a fast-moving retail business.

Responsibilities

• Set the direction for the company's AI platform, including its technical standards as the field matures.
• Raise engineering capability across the company through code review, pairing, and building tools people choose to use on their own merits.
• Make build-or-buy decisions that will shape the platform for years, and be ready to defend them.
• Clarify problems that are still ill-defined, and say plainly when a workflow should not be agentic.
• Set engineering practices for AI development, testing, evaluation, monitoring, observability and reliability.
• Put governance, security and guardrails in place so AI solutions are responsible and trustworthy.
• Design, build and ship AI applications, intelligent agents and agentic workflows aimed at high-impact business problems.
• Build systems that use planning, reasoning, memory and tool use to automate or support complex processes.
• Connect LLMs, enterprise data, APIs and business systems into complete AI experiences.
• Build and run scalable agent orchestration and RAG and knowledge retrieval architectures.
• Prototype new AI capabilities and quickly turn promising ones into production systems.
• Work with business and technology leaders to find where AI can create measurable value.
• Track how solutions perform, measure business impact, and improve results using data and feedback.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, artificial intelligence, data science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience, is preferred.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 2+ years building and running production AI systems.
• Hands-on experience building and operating agentic systems in production, covering planning, reasoning, memory and tool calling.
• Experience designing AI evaluation frameworks, test methods and production monitoring that check accuracy, reliability, safety and business results in live operations.
• Strong Python skills, plus experience building APIs, backend services and cloud-native applications.
• Deep experience with current LLM platforms and orchestration frameworks, with the judgment to pick the right one for each case.
• Experience connecting AI systems to enterprise APIs, databases, SaaS platforms and business systems.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and communication skills, and the ability to turn business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Preferred: experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings and enterprise knowledge retrieval.
• Preferred: experience with low-code and pro-code enterprise AI platforms, such as Azure AI Foundry, Google Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Agent 365 or Copilot Studio.
• Preferred: experience with Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform.
• Preferred: experience with AI observability, governance, security and compliance frameworks.
• Preferred: familiarity with MLOps, model lifecycle management and AI deployment pipelines.
• Preferred: experience in retail, direct-to-consumer, ecommerce or a similar consumer setting.
• Preferred: a demonstrated interest in emerging AI technology and applied innovation.

Conditions

The salary range is $197,500 to $264,390 per year.

The role is bonus eligible.

Your information is kept confidential in line with EEO guidelines.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Savings and retirement plan
• Employee assistance program
• Generous employee discount and industry perks
• Paid time off
• Wellness and fitness benefits