Principal AI Platform Engineer

Description

The role leads technical direction for a fast-growing, strategically important unit of the company, CRM & Industry Workflows, where agentic AI drives sales automation, CPQ, customer service and field service.

You will be the lead architect for the forward deployed engineering group inside CRM & Industry Engineering, turning product ambition into working solutions with real customers.

Customer contact is central. Agentic systems behave probabilistically, so your value lies in choosing the right use cases, designing for production, and checking that autonomous behavior matches what customers want.

The patterns you set will be reused across a growing team and customer base, and your field feedback can shape the platform itself.

The growth potential is significant for a senior engineer who wants to define an emerging discipline and build a team's technical foundation.

Responsibilities

• Work with customer business and technical staff to understand their processes, data and goals in sales automation, CPQ, customer service and field service, then shape unclear problems into scoped agentic use cases with defined success measures.
• Design agentic solutions on the platform, covering agent workflows, tool and system integrations, data and context, and guardrails, so they fit the customer's existing systems and deliver measurable results.
• Own delivery from design to live use: build and configure the solution, integrate it with customer systems, test behavior against intent, and guide it through the customer's environment into production.
• Define the group's multi-engagement technical direction, reference architectures, reusable deployment patterns and accelerators so successful work scales rather than being rebuilt each time.
• Act as the senior engineering voice with customers, from working sessions to executives, explaining what agentic AI can and cannot do, the tradeoffs involved, and how to adopt it responsibly.
• Verify that deployed agents are correct, secure and reliable: test edge cases and failure modes, defend against prompt injection and data leakage, and set up monitoring and rollback for behavioral drift.
• Provide architectural direction, review and mentoring across the group's engagements, helping solve the hardest technical problems and raising solutioning and delivery standards.
• Pass field learnings, including recurring use cases, gaps and platform friction, to product and engineering to improve the platform for CRM & Industry customers.

Requirements

• A proven record designing, deploying and operating production software and AI solutions with customers, including leading complex engagements to good business outcomes. As a principal, you are a recognized technical authority who works autonomously, sets multi-engagement strategy and standards, handles ambiguity with confidence, and coaches senior engineers.
• Extensive hands-on experience analyzing needs, designing solutions and taking them to production with customers, in a forward-deployed, professional services, solution architecture or comparable delivery role.
• Hands-on experience building and running autonomous agent systems, including planning, tool invocation, memory, context design and guardrails, plus a solid understanding of LLM behavior, evaluation and failure modes. This is not an AI research or foundation-model role.
• Knowledge of the company platform and the CRM & Industry areas (sales automation, CPQ, customer service, field service) is preferred but not required.
• Expert system design: sound architecture and sequencing under uncertainty, end-to-end solutions across systems and data, and judgment on what to build, buy or configure. You define architecture patterns that hold across customers.
• A skeptical eye for whether output meets intent, with working knowledge of AI-specific security and reliability risks and how to control them through least-privilege access, monitoring and rollback.
• Strong communication skills: running discovery and working sessions, influencing technical and executive audiences, and conveying capabilities, limits, tradeoffs and risk clearly.
• A record of leading and coaching engineers, including senior ones, setting reusable standards and lifting a group's delivery rather than only personal output.
• Education: a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or certifications are a plus but cannot replace proven ability to deliver reliable AI solutions to customers.
• Experience: 15 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree in computer science; or 12 years with a master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years; or equivalent experience. Advanced degrees or certifications are a plus but do not replace proven ability to ship reliable software with AI-native practices.

Conditions

Base pay for positions in this location is $221,200 - $387,100. Actual pay depends on qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location, and the guideline may change with location.

Equity is offered when applicable, alongside variable or incentive compensation.

Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive structure.

Work persona (flexible, remote or required in office) is assigned based on the nature of the work and work location, and the company may check your home distance to the nearest office using a third-party service.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match, employee stock purchase plan, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs.