Principal AI Engineer

The Principal Engineer, AI Orchestration & Retrieval defines how the enterprise's central AI system is composed – the orchestration and abstraction layers that connect LLMs to tools, data, and one another, and the retrieval systems that ground them. This role sets the strategy and builds the reality for how we build and expose tools (including MCP servers), how we structure retrieval and chunking, and when to rely on specialized sub-agents versus directly exposing tools to a model.

Essential Job Functions and Responsibilities

- Design the orchestration and abstraction layers of the central AI system that connect LLMs to tools, data, and sub-agents

- Design, build, and operate MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and set standards for how tools are defined, exposed, and versioned

- Define tool-surface strategy: the optimal number of tools exposed to an LLM, the optimal number of APIs per MCP server, and how to keep tool surfaces coherent and discoverable

- Establish when to use specialized sub-agents versus directly exposing tools to a model, and design the corresponding multi-agent patterns

- Design retrieval (RAG) systems: chunking strategies, embedding models, vector stores, hybrid/keyword search, re-ranking, and context assembly

- Define abstraction layers that decouple product teams from the underlying models, tools, and providers

- Build routing, context-window management, and memory strategies for agentic workflows

- Define evaluation for orchestration and retrieval quality (retrieval precision/recall, tool-selection accuracy, task success, latency, and cost)

- Establish observability and tracing across multi-step agent and tool calls

- Address safety, guardrails, authentication, and access control across tools and agents

- Partner with product teams to onboard their capabilities as tools and agents into the central AI system

- Mentor engineers and raise orchestration and retrieval maturity across teams

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

- Deep hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or equivalents) and agentic patterns