Principal AI Engineer - Frontier Data

Principal AI Engineer - Frontier Data

San Francisco, California, United States

About Turing

Based in San Francisco, California, Turing is the world's leading research accelerator for frontier AI labs and a trusted partner for global enterprises looking to deploy advanced AI systems. Turing accelerates frontier research with high-quality data, specialized talent, and training pipelines that advance thinking, reasoning, coding, multimodality, and STEM. For enterprises, Turing builds proprietary intelligence systems that integrate AI into mission-critical workflows, unlock transformative outcomes, and drive lasting competitive advantage.

Recognized by Forbes, The Information, and Fast Company among the world's top innovators, Turing's leadership team includes AI technologists from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, McKinsey, Bain, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. Learn more at

The Role

We are looking for an elite engineer who builds like a hacker and communicates like a consultant. You will not just be building models in a notebook; you will be deployed to the front lines to build, architect, and ship end-to-end Agentic AI products directly for our most strategic customers.

This is a high-stakes role. You will face "tricky" customers who have vague requirements and high expectations. Your job is to translate their chaos into technical order, write production-grade code, and deploy autonomous agents that solve their actual business problems.

What You Will Do

• Build & Deploy (60%):
• Design and ship full-stack AI applications. You own the pipeline from data ingestion to the LLM inference layer to the frontend interface.
• Architect autonomous agentic workflows (using frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or custom implementations) that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks.
• Write robust, clean, and highly testable code (Python/Typescript). "It works on my machine" is not acceptable; it must work in the customer's restricted cloud environment.
• Handle DevOps and MLOps constraints: Dockerizing agents, managing Kubernetes clusters, and optimizing inference latency.
• Customer Engineering (40%):
• Serve as the technical face of the company for our most demanding accounts.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments. You will push back on unrealistic demands, clarify ambiguous requirements, and steer "tricky" customers toward technically feasible solutions without breaking rapport.
• Translate technical constraints into business value for non-technical executives.
• Generate high-quality data for our customers and ability to review the data generated by other experts. This is one of the most critical aspects of the role.

The "Must-Haves"

• Experience: 8–12 years of total engineering experience. You started as a strong Software Engineer and evolved into an AI specialist.
• Education: B.S./M.S. in Computer Science, Math, or Physics from a top-tier institution (IIT, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, CMU, or similar global top-ranking universities).
• Deep AI Fluency: You aren't just calling APIs. You understand RAG implementation nuances, vector database optimization, fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT), and the architecture of agentic loops.
• Production Engineering: Experience with end-to-end deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Docker).

The "Why You" (Soft Skills)

• Thick Skin & High EQ: You don't get flustered when a customer changes their mind for the third time in a week. You can hold your ground with a CTO and explain "why not" to a CEO.
• Extreme Attention to Detail: You catch the edge cases that others miss. You obsess over error handling, retry logic in agents, and data privacy.
• Grit: You enjoy the "messy" work of integrating legacy enterprise data just as much as prompting the latest model.

What Will Set You Apart

• Public Code: A visible GitHub footprint is very helpful. We want to see your side projects, your contributions to open source, or your experiments with LLMs. Please include your GitHub link in your application.

Tech Stack

• Languages: Python (Expert).
• AI/Data: (Expertise in all is not required) PyTorch, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pinecone/Weaviate, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, HuggingFace.
• Infra: (Expertise in all is not required) Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP.

Compensation

232k-260k base + variable + equity

Values

• We are client first: We put our clients at the center of everything we do, because their success is the ultimate measure of our value.

• We work at Start-Up Speed: We move fast, stay agile and favor action because momentum is the foundation of perfection

• We are AI forward: We help our clients build the future of AI and implement it in our own roles and workflow to amplify productivity.

Advantages of joining Turing

• Amazing work culture (Super collaborative & supportive work environment; 5 days a week)

• Awesome colleagues (Surround yourself with top talent from Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc. as well as people with deep startup experience)

• Competitive compensation

• Flexible working hours

Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Turing is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics. At Turing we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace and celebrate authenticity, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

For applicants from the European Union, please review Turing's GDPR notice here.