Principal AI Engineer

Location: New York, NY | Type: Contract (1+ year engagement) | Setup: Hybrid | Experience: 15+ years About the Role We're hiring a Principal AI Engineer to own how AI and ML engineering gets designed, built, governed, and shipped across a portfolio of internal products. You'll set the patterns other engineering teams build on, then prove them out in production code. This is the person who decides what "production-ready AI" means here and makes it real. The work sits at a busy intersection: software engineering, applied ML, platform architecture, and AI governance. One day you're architecting a multi-tenant AI service, the next you're writing evaluation rubrics, hardening against prompt injection, or sitting with Security and Legal to shape SOC2-aligned controls. The client is a global management and advisory firm that solves high-stakes problems for large enterprises, so the AI you build has to hold up under real scrutiny, not just demo well. If you've spent years watching internal AI tooling get reinvented from scratch on every team, this role is the chance to fix that for good. Your success is measured by patterns that outlast your direct involvement. What You'll Do Own the firm's AI productization and governance playbook: service patterns, security and compliance standards, model evaluation rubrics, and production-readiness criteria Build reusable internal tooling (service scaffolding, evaluation and monitoring tooling, data infrastructure) that teams can adopt without ongoing hand-holding Define AI agent governance covering permissions, code execution controls, access to internal systems, and human-in-the-loop enforcement Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance on SOC2 and ISO-aligned AI controls, vendor DPA requirements, and prompt data classification Stand up standardized deployment patterns with containerization, infrastructure-as-code, and reusable CI/CD pipeline templates Champion AI-assisted development across the org, from LLM-integrated workflows to test-driven patterns other teams treat as the baseline Mentor engineers and tech leads, with measurable improvement in delivery consistency and production rigor Serve as the go-to technical authority on AI, ML, and platform architecture, consulted early by senior stakeholders rather than after decisions are made Qualifications Core 15+ years in software engineering, data science, or a closely related technical field Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field Deep expertise across AI and ML frameworks and the Python ecosystem, with hands‑on experience deploying models to public cloud Proven track record designing and operating multi‑tenant AI services and LLM integrations in production Platform and Security Strong command of microservices architecture: decomposing monoliths, defining service contracts, operationalizing CI/CD for distributed systems Hands‑on with Docker, Terraform, and modern DevOps practices Substantive AI and LLM security experience, including prompt injection, data boundary enforcement, model supply chain risk, and AI‑specific threat modeling Experience building governance frameworks, evaluation rubrics, and reusable platform patterns at scale Nice to Have AI/ML applied in consulting, advisory, or professional services contexts Experience defining AI compliance controls for SOC2, ISO 27001, or TISAX Open‑source contributions, publications, or active involvement in technical communities Additional languages such as Go or TypeScript, and certifications in AI, cloud architecture, or security (AWS/GCP/Azure ML, CISSP) Why Join Us You'll be the technical center of gravity for AI across the firm, with a mandate to set standards rather than just follow them. The team works across the full sweep of the business, so the problems are varied and the stakeholders are senior enough that good architecture actually gets adopted. This is a hybrid role based in New York, with some travel depending on client and team needs. If you want your engineering judgment to shape how an entire organization builds AI, this is that seat. #J-18808-Ljbffr Elios AI