Principal AI Engineer

About the role

As a Principal AI Engineer at Vanguard, you will work on developing and enhancing AI agents and backend systems for Vanguard’s AI platform, integrating these with relevant pipelines and observability. You will evaluate large language models (LLMs) and emerging technologies to identify innovation opportunities, design and optimize prompts for LLMs, implement safeguards to ensure secure, ethical AI responses, and build APIs, microservices, and data integrations for AI features.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance AI agents and backend systems for Vanguard’s AI platform, integrated with relevant pipelines and observability
• Evaluate LLMs and emerging technologies to identify innovation opportunities
• Design and optimize prompts for LLMs
• Implement safeguards to ensure secure, ethical AI responses
• Build APIs, microservices, and data integrations for AI features
• Write clean, maintainable code following industry best practices
• Provide vision, direction, and expertise to leadership on implementing innovative and significant business solutions
• Lead the development team to build and orchestrate scalable and resilient AI applications powered by AI models, in close collaboration with cross-functional teams within the organization
• Stay current on AI best practices and emerging technologies; recommend impactful innovations

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on engineering experience with proven AI application development (LLMs, embeddings, vector search, RAG pipelines, and fine-tuning)
• 5+ years' hands-on programming and/or scripting experience in one or more of the following: Java, Python, Shell scripting, etc.
• 5+ years’ experience with Infrastructure as code (IaC) implementation using Terraform, Crossplane or any other industry equivalent solutions
• 5+ years’ experience with AWS Cloud Platform, and/or Microsoft Azure hands-on experience
• 5+ years’ experience with enterprise-grade automation solutions design and implementation experience using tools such as Ansible, Harness CD, GitHub Actions, Playwright etc.
• 2+ years of experience with AI, Gen AI, and Agentic automation solutions design and development

Qualifications

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex projects with limited supervision and high accountability
• Proven track record in enterprise-scale AI deployments, model migration projects, and innovation initiatives
• Demonstrated thought leadership through the publication of at least one white paper and/or presentation at well-known industry conferences.