Principal Engineer - AI Platform & Operations

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology, with offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, China, and a new hub in Bengaluru, India. This remote Principal Engineer role can be based in Washington or California state. You will serve as the technical expert for our AI Platform & Operations, owning the technical vision for foundational systems that power every AI product team across the company.

Responsibilities

• Architect the long-term technical roadmap for the AI platform, covering model serving, feature stores, experiment tracking, and CI/CD for ML
• Establish engineering benchmarks for deployment, versioning, A/B testing, and automated rollbacks
• Lead strategies for GPU/compute efficiency and cost optimization while managing LLM inference complexities (quantization, batching, latency) at scale
• Design sophisticated monitoring and alerting systems tailored for AI workloads in production
• Drive platform stability and partner with application teams to ensure infrastructure meets evolving product needs
• Mentor senior engineers, lead architecture reviews, and evaluate next-generation cloud services and ML frameworks

Requirements

• 12+ years of engineering experience, with at least 4 years at a Principal or Distinguished level
• Expert-level knowledge of model serving (e.g., Triton, vLLM, Ray Serve) and deep experience with Kubernetes and cloud ecosystems (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Proven experience with MLOps tools such as MLflow, Weights & Biases, or Kubeflow
• High proficiency in Python and a systems-thinking approach to Docker, Helm, and containerization
• Hands-on experience operating LLM inference at scale with deep understanding of throughput vs. latency trade-offs
• Track record of building internal platforms that treat other engineers as the primary customer, drastically improving engineering velocity

Benefits

• Competitive base pay
• Medical benefits
• Discretionary incentive plan based on individual and company performance
• Focus on development: access to a learning & development platform and opportunity to own your career pathways
• Flexible work policy

Pay

The pay range is between $168,000 – $230,000 USD as a base salary offering annually.