Principal Ai Engineer

RETAIL DOMAIN

( Need only Senior 12+ Candidates )Principal AI Engineer Remote

Job details:
Job title: Principal AI Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA Remote
Duration: Long-term

We are seeking a senior‑level AI/ML engineering contractor to temporarily step into a technical leadership and team‑lead role supporting personalization models and the company’s AI platform. The ideal candidate can balance technical expertise, strategic decision‑making, and day‑to‑day team guidance to ensure continuity during the leave period.

Key Responsibilities:
1. Technical Leadership for Personalization Models

• Lead team performing development, improvement, and rollout of machine‑learning models that power personalized content, offers, and product recommendations.
• Advise on model testing and experimentation, ensuring that new versions are evaluated properly before rollout.
• Manage model performance, reliability, and response‑time improvements.
2. AI Platform Stewardship:
• Drive enhancements to shared AI infrastructure, including data pipelines, model‑serving interfaces, monitoring, and observability.
• Ensure engineering standards and best practices are followed across teams using the platform.
• Partner with data engineering, product, and business teams to align platform capabilities with strategic needs.
3. Team & Program Leadership:
• Provide technical direction to engineers and data scientists working across recommendation and personalization initiatives.
• Maintain clear documentation and organize technical materials to keep ongoing work unblocked.
• Coordinate cross‑functional planning, ensuring teams have clarity on goals, priorities, and dependencies.
4. Strategic Planning & Delivery Management:
• Make informed tradeoff decisions balancing speed, accuracy, reliability, and business value.
• Ensure work continues to move forward smoothly in areas such as model upgrades, new placements, and user‑facing improvements.
• Guide team in adopting AI solutions to accelerate SDLC
Required Skills & Experience:
• Senior‑level experience building and operating machine‑learning systems in production.
• Strong understanding of ranking models, recommendation systems, model evaluation, and experiment design.
• Hands‑on expertise with modern AI/ML engineering tools (e.g., Python, Spark or similar, cloud‑based ML pipelines, cloud model‑serving frameworks, and API design).
• Ability to lead engineering discussions, guide team members, and provide clear direction.
• Strong organizational skills: able to manage complex projects and maintain structure during a temporary leadership period.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical details into clear action for partners and stakeholders