Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer (Chicago)

***Hybrid, 3 days onsite, 2 days remote*** ***We are unable to sponsor as this is a permanent full-time role*** Responsibilities: Partner with the Executive Director, AI Engineering to help define and execute on the company AI technical roadmap Lead and partner on the architecture of scalable systems incorporating LLMs and AI into organizational processes and infrastructure Provide technical mentorship to junior engineers on engineering best practices and system design Conduct code/architectural reviews ensuring production readiness, safety, and adherence to high security and compliance standards Implement testing, evaluation, and monitoring frameworks for AI systems including hallucination detection and bias assessment Establish safety guardrails and responsible AI practices for LLM applications in a regulated environment Connect AI agents to organizational systems and workflows Foster continuous learning culture in a rapidly evolving AI landscape Qualifications: Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related technical field 10+ years software engineering/systems architecture experience with strong technical leadership 5+ years as senior technical contributor on complex production systems Expert in Python and proficient in SQL System design expertise: monolithic and microservice architectures, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs Hands-on experience in data (e.g., data engineering, data pipelines, data transformation) Foundational experience with LLMs and familiarity with multiple frontier lab models (e.g., Gemini, Claude, GPT) Familiarity of risk vectors in AI applications including hallucinations, bias, prompt injection, data privacy Production experience with AI applications or LLM-powered systems Experience with RAG architectures and context engineering Familiarity with diverse LLM provider APIs and experience connecting agents to systems Experience tinkering with frontier lab tools and products Cloud platforms/technologies: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform