Principal AI Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineering and Science H2O.ai is on a mission to democratize AI for Good. As the world’s leading agentic AI company, H2O.ai converges Generative and Predictive AI to help enterprises and public sector agencies develop purpose-built Agents, SLMs, and solutions on their private data. With a focus on secure, compliant, and infrastructure-flexible Sovereign AI deployments, H2O.ai delivers solutions that align with the highest standards of data privacy and control. Its open-source technology is trusted by over 20,000 organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500. H2O.ai powers AI transformation for companies like AT&T, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Workday, Progressive Insurance, and NIH. We are looking for a Principal AI Engineer who builds things that matter. You will design and ship end-to-end AI solutions for some of our most complex enterprise problems - spanning agentic AI systems, LLM applications, and production ML pipelines. This is a hands-on engineering role embedded within a customer-facing field team, meaning your work will be seen, used, and evaluated by real enterprises from day one. You will work alongside Kaggle Grandmasters, ML engineers, and domain experts to deliver AI that goes beyond demos - into production, into workflows, and into measurable business outcomes. This position is based in Dallas, Texas and requires onsite customer interfacing. What You Will Do Customer Engagement Leadership Lead end-to-end technical engagement with enterprise customers, acting as the senior point of accountability for delivery quality, stakeholder relationships, and outcomes. Manage multiple concurrent engagement streams simultaneously – coordinating workplans, resourcing, and milestones across cross-functional teams. Serve as the primary technical escalation point for customer issues, proactively identifying risks and driving resolution across engineering, product, and leadership. Build and maintain trusted relationships with customer data science teams, engineering leads, and executive stakeholders – translating business needs into technical direction and back again. Lead pre-sales and proof-of-concept engagements, setting the technical strategy and ensuring the team delivers demonstrations that build genuine enterprise trust. Represent H2O.ai externally at customer workshops, executive briefings, and technical deep-dives as a credible senior voice. Agentic AI & LLM Engineering Design and build agentic AI systems and multi-agent frameworks that automate complex, multi-step enterprise workflows. Develop and deploy LLM-powered applications using RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, function calling, and tool use. Implement guardrails, evaluation frameworks, and responsible AI controls to ensure production-grade reliability and safety. Stay current with the rapidly evolving agentic AI landscape – MCP, LLM orchestration frameworks, reasoning models – and bring the best into customer engagements. End-to-End AI Application Development Own the full development lifecycle across multiple streams: from problem framing and data exploration through model development, API integration, and production deployment. Build scalable backend services and APIs that expose AI capabilities to enterprise applications and workflows. Integrate AI models into customer environments – cloud, on-prem, and hybrid – ensuring performance, stability, and maintainability at scale. Develop ML pipelines and LLMOps infrastructure that support continuous model improvement and monitoring in production. Team Collaboration & Delivery Excellence Coordinate delivery across engineers, program managers, and solution architects – ensuring workstreams are aligned, unblocked, and progressing to plan. Set the technical bar for the engagements you lead #J-18808-Ljbffr h2o.ai