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Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems

Inflection AI· Engineering
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Palo Alto, CA$400k - $550kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Hands-on Principal Engineer to lead architecture and technical direction of Inflection's agentic AI systems, building production AI agents, designing scalable architectures, evaluation frameworks, observability, and reliability systems while mentoring engineers and establishing technical standards.

Responsibilities

  • Build production AI agents that can plan, retrieve context, call tools, take actions, and recover from failures.
  • Design agent architectures for task decomposition, tool routing, memory, state management, human approval, and safe execution.
  • Create evals and observability systems for multi-step task success, tool-call accuracy, hallucination resistance, latency, cost, and failure modes.
  • Integrate agents with APIs, databases, SaaS tools, enterprise systems, internal systems, and user-facing workflows.
  • Improve reliability through structured outputs, guardrails, fallback paths, monitoring, permissions, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls.
  • Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to turn ambiguous user problems into shipped AI-native features.
  • Make pragmatic model and infrastructure choices across proprietary models, open-source models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and cloud environments.
  • Contribute to technical direction, engineering best practices, and the quality bar for agentic AI systems.
  • Own the technical direction of agentic AI systems, provide support and coaching to the team.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years at staff/principal or equivalent scope, and 2+ years building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems used by real customers.
  • Strong Python or TypeScript experience.
  • Experience building LLM-powered products, AI agents, RAG systems, automation workflows, or model-integrated applications.
  • Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including APIs, databases, queues, testing, observability, cloud infrastructure, and deployment.
  • Experience with tool/function calling, structured outputs, embeddings, retrieval, prompt design, and model evaluation.
  • Strong product judgment and ability to move from ambiguous problem to shipped product quickly.
  • Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving environment with ownership, collaboration, and high technical standards.
  • Have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements

Skills

Required:PythonTypeScriptLLM-powered products / AI agents / RAG systems

Benefits

  • Robust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA
  • 401k matching program
  • Flexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave
  • Parental, Medical and Family care leave
  • Generous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends
  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Inflection AI

Pi, your personal AI

Inflection AI is pioneering the future with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI that transforms interactions from transactional to reltational, creating enduring value for individuals and enterprises alike.

AIemotional intelligencehuman-centered interactionliquid-ai-recruiting-target
Company profileWebsite

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