Principal AI Engineer

Job Description

The role, in a nutshell:

The Staff Engineer, AI Solutions, will serve as a technical leader responsible for designing, building, and scaling AI-powered solutions that directly impact Chainguard’s go-to-market organization. This role partners closely with the Senior Director of AI Solutions to turn business problems into production-grade AI systems used by Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Revenue Operations. As a senior individual contributor, you will lead technical design, set engineering standards, and drive hands-on implementation of GenAI and machine learning solutions embedded in GTM workflows. You’ll operate at the intersection of AI, data, and business systems, balancing innovation with reliability, security, and scale. This role is ideal for an engineer who thrives on ownership, ambiguity, and delivering immediate impact.

What you will do

• Experiment Constantly! Design, build, and operate production-grade AI solutions that support GTM use cases, including account intelligence, deal prioritization, forecasting, personalization, enablement, and customer insights.
  
  
• Evaluate new AI technologies, frameworks, and vendors, contributing to build vs. buy decisions and technical direction.
  
  
• Lead the technical architecture and implementation of GenAI and ML systems, including LLM-powered applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), recommendation systems, and predictive models.
  
  
• Partner closely with the Senior Director of AI Solutions and GTM stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical designs.
  
  
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of AI solutions, from data ingestion and feature development to model deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
  
  
• Integrate AI capabilities into existing GTM platforms and workflows (e.g., Salesforce, internal tools, analytics platforms).
  
  
• Establish best practices for AI engineering, including model evaluation, observability, performance optimization, and reliability.
  
  
• Collaborate with Data, GTM Systems, Security, and Legal teams to ensure solutions meet data quality, privacy, security, and compliance standards.
  
  
• Drive adoption by ensuring AI solutions are usable, trusted, and embedded into how GTM teams work day to day.
  
  

What we are looking for

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or ML engineering, with hands-on experience delivering AI-powered systems to production.
  
  
• Strong practical experience with Generative AI and LLM-based systems, including prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and evaluation techniques.
  
  
• Experience building and deploying machine learning models or intelligent systems that support decision-making or automation.
  
  
• Solid understanding of data pipelines, feature engineering, APIs, and system integration, even if you’re not a full-time data platform engineer.
  
  
• Proficiency in modern programming languages commonly used in AI systems (e.g., Python, SQL, and/or backend languages such as Go or Java).
  
  
• Experience integrating AI solutions into business applications or GTM systems, such as CRM, analytics, or internal tooling.
  
  
• Strong architectural judgment, with the ability to make tradeoffs between speed, quality, scalability, and maintainability.