Principal AI (Artificial Intelligence) Engineer

NO SPONSORSHIP - NO OPT

Principal , (AI) Artificial Intelligence Engineering

SALARY: $200K - $230k - $240k plus 30% bonus

LOCATION: Chicago, IL

Hybrid 3 days onsite

Looking for an AI research and engineering expert. Python SQL data engineering AI LLM, LLM powered applications

You won't manage people; you'll do the work, set the technical standard, and lead through expertise. You'll be the primary driver of agentic AI capabilities, architecting and building the systems that connect AI agents to real enterprise workflows in one of the most consequential and carefully regulated environments in financial markets. Our team works directly with AWS and Anthropic, accessing Claude models through both.

If you're a seasoned engineer who wants to stay hands-on, lead through technical excellence, and build agentic AI systems that matter this role was written for you.

• Define and execute AI technical roadmap, translating organizational priorities into concrete architectural decisions
• Lead agentic AI efforts: architect, build, and operate systems that connect AI agents to internal systems, data pipelines, and business workflows
• Leverage direct relationships with AWS and Anthropic to evaluate and adopt new model capabilities and tooling as they become available
• Build and ship production AI applications on AWS using Claude and related Anthropic tooling, maintaining high standards for reliability, security, and auditability
• Architect scalable systems that integrate LLMs and AI agents into internal systems, operational workflows, and business processes, owning decisions from design through production deployment

Qualifications:

Required

• Expert-level Python; proficient in SQL
• Deep system design expertise: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, and MCP servers
• Hands-on experience with data engineering: pipelines, transformation, and data modeling
• AWS experience; comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong production AI/LLM experience, or demonstrated hands-on passion for the space with the engineering depth to ramp quickly
• Strong working knowledge of AI risk vectors: hallucinations, prompt injection, bias, data privacy, and output validation
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated technical leadership
• 5+ years as a senior individual contributor on complex, high-stakes production systems