Principal AI Engineer (Dublin)

This job is with Cornerstone OnDemand, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

We are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to design, build, and scale AI-driven systems across our product platforms. This role is ideal for a deeply technical engineer who leads through hands-on contribution, solves complex problems, and drives the adoption of AI into real-world products.

The ideal candidate brings strong backend and cloud fundamentals , mandatory experience with Java and AWS , and proven experience integrating AI and Generative AI capabilities into production systems. You will work closely with product, architecture, and engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable, AI-enabled solutions that create meaningful business impact.

In this role you will...

AI Engineering & System Design

• Design, build, and operate AI-powered applications , including LLM-based services, ML-driven workflows, and intelligent automation.
• Integrate AI capabilities into Java-based backend systems and cloud-native platforms.
• Design scalable API-first services (REST & GraphQL) exposing AI capabilities across products.
• Implement data pipelines supporting feature engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, and inference .
• Apply best practices for prompt design, model orchestration, evaluation, and observability .

Cloud & Platform Engineering (AWS - Must Have)

• Build and operate cloud-native AI systems on AWS , including EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and EKS.
• Design containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS) .
• Optimize systems for scalability, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency .
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or AWS CDK .

Data & Distributed Systems

• Design and operate relational (SQL) and NoSQL data stores for high-scale, distributed systems.
• Make informed trade-offs around data consistency, availability, and performance.
• Work with event-driven and asynchronous architectures where appropriate.

Technical Leadership & Impact

• Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through production deployment.
• Influence system design and engineering standards across teams through design reviews and technical guidance.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the overall bar for AI and cloud engineering excellence .
• Collaborate with Product, Data, UX, Security, and DevOps teams to deliver AI-driven product capabilities.

You have what it takes if you have...

• 8-10 years of hands-on software engineering experience building large-scale, production systems.
• Strong, hands-on experience with Java in backend and distributed systems.
• Mandatory, hands-on experience with AWS , including designing and operating cloud-native workloads.
• Strong experience with SQL and NoSQL databases in production environments.
• 3+ years of experience building AI-powered applications , including ML or LLM-based systems.
• Experience with API-first architectures (REST, GraphQL).
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS) .
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to own systems end-to-end.

An extra dose of awesome if...

• Experience with Generative AI platforms and frameworks (AWS Bedrock, OpenAI APIs, LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Experience with vector databases and semantic search .
• Familiarity with MLOps practices , model monitoring, and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience working in product-driven, agile environments.