Principal Engineer – AI Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Define and take ownership of the architecture for the AI platform, encompassing retrieval infrastructure, model lifecycle, evaluation framework, guardrails, and design of GenAI product features.

• Spearhead the development of a shared AI platform layer that is utilized by all AI product features and is accessible for reuse by internal business teams.

• Actively contribute by building production AI systems, creating proofs of concept, and validating architecture through functional software.

• Establish and uphold technical standards for the AI Platform team; facilitate architecture reviews and model quality assessments.

• Collaborate with the Personalization team to delineate clear boundaries between the GenAI product layer and the existing ML personalization infrastructure.

• Infuse AI platform-specific patterns and insights into iHerb's shared AI-driven Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) golden path.

• Navigate and lead complex cross-cutting technical decisions across various teams and shared platform services.

• Establish and refine iHerb's AI-driven SDLC golden path: shared standards, Claude Code competencies, guardrails, and automation patterns.

• Guide intricate multi-team technical initiatives by coordinating architecture reviews, aligning peer Principals and Engineering Managers (EMs), and resolving conflicting approaches.

• Mentor and elevate the technical standards across the engineering organization through code reviews, architecture evaluations, and direct coaching of senior engineers.

• Serve as a representative of engineering in cross-functional discussions with product management, data science, security, and infrastructure teams.

• Contribute architectural decisions to the shared knowledge base, ensuring that institutional knowledge accumulates throughout the organization.

⛳️ Requirements

• Typically requires a minimum of 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a considerable portion at senior, staff, or principal individual contributor level.

• AI-driven SDLC (mandatory): proven experience utilizing AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor for deploying production systems.

• Architecture at scale: experience in designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems involving multiple teams over several years: APIs, data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or high-traffic platforms.

• Cross-organizational technical leadership: demonstrated success in driving architectural standards, technical roadmaps, or platform initiatives that affect multiple teams or organizations.

• Engineering quality mindset: strong beliefs regarding code quality, observability, CI/CD, test automation, and maintaining velocity while avoiding the accumulation of hidden debts.

• Communication and influence: capable of drafting clear architecture documents, presenting to both technical and non-technical audiences, and achieving consensus without formal authority.

• Experience in working within distributed teams across the United States, China, and Latin America.

• Hands-on experience in designing and operating AI platform systems: RAG pipelines, vector search, embedding infrastructure, or retrieval-augmented applications at scale.

• Practical experience with LLM evaluation: constructing evaluation frameworks, defining quality metrics, and iterating on model and prompt quality based on data.

• MLOps experience: expertise in model deployment, monitoring, lifecycle management, and cost governance within a production environment.

• Experience in building and operating agentic systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar.

• Experience in implementing GenAI in production is essential; prototype or research-only background is insufficient at this level.

• High level of precision and attention to detail.

• Outstanding organizational skills and capability to manage multiple tasks simultaneously.

🏝️ Benefits

• Eligible employees (and their families) can participate in our medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance programs as outlined in applicable plan documents, and may enroll in the company’s 401(k) plan.

• Employees will also qualify for Time Off and Paid Sick Leave in accordance with the company’s policies. Paid holidays are provided throughout the calendar year.

• The hired candidate may be granted Restricted Stock Units and be eligible for annual bonuses based on the criteria defined in the respective plan documents and policies.