Principal AI Platform Engineer

Abbott seeks a Principal AI Platform Engineer to lead the architecture and engineering of its enterprise AI platform, enabling teams to build and deploy generative AI systems safely and efficiently. This hands-on technical leadership role requires designing control planes, model gateways, and observability systems while building and coaching a platform engineering team of 3–8 engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve reference architecture for AI control plane, paved-road services, SDKs, templates, and developer experience
• Design and build model gateway supporting multi-provider routing, failover, quota limiting, tenant isolation, and cost allocation
• Deliver GenAI runtime for model serving, RAG, context stores, vector search, tool execution, and MCP-style interoperability
• Own technical design of model, agent, prompt, and tool registries with versioning, approval gates, and auditability
• Build platform observability and traceability using distributed tracing, evaluation signals, and cost monitoring; lead security and guardrails implementation

Requirements

• 10–15+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, or distributed systems experience with significant technical leadership
• Hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise AI/GenAI platforms or comparable developer platforms in production
• Strong software engineering in Python and one of TypeScript, Go, or Java; APIs, distributed systems, and secure SDLC expertise
• Deep technical understanding of model gateways, GenAI runtimes, RAG, agent registries, observability, guardrails, and platform governance
• Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cloud services, secrets management, and production SLOs
• Bachelor's degree in related field or equivalent professional experience
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical decisions, influence across teams, and manage a growing engineering team

Compensation: $149,300–$298,700 base