Principal AI Engineer

About the role

MARS Solutions Group is seeking a Principal AI Engineer for a 3-4 month engagement with our client, a Building Automation industry leader. The role involves embedding within the Controls Software team to develop foundational architecture assets and deployment playbooks for AI adoption across their smart building platform.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate daily with Controls SW engineers, architects, and product managers
• Partner with internal domain experts to onboard to the platform
• Drive the architecture, validate assumptions with the team, and produce deliverables iteratively
• Participate in team rituals (standups, design reviews, retrospectives)

Requirements

• AI Systems & Architecture: 10+ years of hands-on software or systems engineering experience, with at least 6 years focused on AI/ML in production environments
• Proven experience designing and deploying AI/ML systems at scale from data ingestion through inference and monitoring
• Deep knowledge of MLOps: model deployment pipelines, versioning, observability, drift detection, and continuous improvement
• Experience with edge-to-cloud AI execution strategies: balancing latency, cost, and resiliency across distributed environments, including LLM cost optimization (model selection, caching, routing)
• Strong command of data pipeline architecture, time-series data, event-driven systems, and API/microservices patterns

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in industrial, OT, or IoT environments (building automation, manufacturing, energy, or similar)
• Familiarity with protocols such as BACnet, MQTT, Modbus, or OPC UA
• Exposure to cybersecurity frameworks in OT environments (e.g., IEC 62443, NIST CSF)
• Experience with AI use cases in buildings or critical infrastructure: FDD, energy optimization, predictive maintenance, alarm intelligence
• Experience with containerization, CI/CD tooling, and observability platforms
• Experience operationalizing AI safety guardrails, content filtering, and governance controls in production