Job description

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer

Work Location:

Columbus, Ohio Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH

Contract Duration:

6–12 Months

Work Arrangement:

Remote with periodic onsite visits in Columbus, OH (~10%, quarterly)

Job Description:

You'll be the founding engineer

, building and operating the AI platform and the first production applications on it — end to end, from infrastructure and orchestration through evaluation and monitoring.

This is a principal-scope, hands-on role where you will ship code every week and own it in production.

What You'll Do:

Build and operate the governed enterprise MCP gateway and Azure AI environments

.
Implement SAP identity passthrough in partnership with the IT/SAP organization.
Own CI/CD for AI assets

, evaluation, observability, and cost/usage telemetry.
Ship the first production AI use case and prioritized portfolio including retrieval, grounding, and agentic workflows

.
Co-build with an enterprise integration partner while keeping core capabilities in-house.
Define engineering standards, tooling, and practices and serve as a technical lead as the team grows.

Required Qualifications:

10+ years of software engineering experience.
Strong Python and/or TypeScript skills.
Deep Azure expertise including infrastructure-as-code (Bicep or Terraform), networking, identity, container platforms, and Azure AI services.
Production experience building and running LLM or agentic systems end to end.
Experience with evaluation engineering

, including datasets, metrics, regression tests, and CI release gates.
Experience owning CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
Strong identity-aware API and integration design experience.
Experience partnering with vendors while keeping core capabilities in-house.
AI-augmented development using tools such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

Preferred Qualifications:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation experience.
SAP or enterprise ERP integration experience.
Enterprise integration/automation ( iPaaS

) experience.
Technical leadership or mentoring experience.
Experience in regulated or industrial-sector environments

.