Principal Applied AI Engineer

Title

Principal Applied AI Engineer

Company

CINC

Location

Worldwide (remote-first, hybrid optional)

Reports to

Director, AI Development

About CINC

CINC is one platform for the full work of community management. More than 55,000 associations and more than 6 million doors rely on it, from the management company teams who run the work to the boards and residents who experience the result. In January 2024, Hg Capital made a significant investment in CINC to accelerate growth and rapid product development.

What sets CINC apart is Community Intelligence℠: the advantage created when trusted community information and actions work together across the platform. Powered by Cephai, the AI engine inside CINC, it brings the right context and next step into the work while keeping people in control. Intelligence recommends. People decide. The goal is simple: Less Tedious. More Meaningful.

The systems we build are increasingly complex and interconnected. Success here is not defined only by writing correct code or shipping features quickly. It takes system design, judgment, orchestration, and craftsmanship. The engineers who make the biggest difference create multiplier effects for their teams, and design systems that are trustworthy, reliable, and a pleasure for clients to use.

Role overview

We are hiring a Principal Applied AI Engineer to build and lead a high-performing product team developing Cephai-powered capabilities inside the CINC platform.

This is a practical, hands-on leadership role. Principals at CINC are both technical experts and team leaders. You will guide the engineering direction of a team, recruit and mentor strong engineers, and help design the systems that bring Community Intelligence into the product.

The role sits at the intersection of software engineering, system design, and applied AI. We are not looking for a research scientist. We are looking for someone who can take AI technologies and build real production systems that solve client problems, with people in control of the outcome.

You will lead a small engineering team responsible for an important part of the platform, combining leadership, architecture, and hands-on engineering. You will guide the team in building capabilities such as intelligent automation workflows, retrieval-based systems, and AI-driven operational tooling. These systems must run reliably in a large production environment and integrate cleanly with the rest of the platform.

You will also help develop the team itself. Principals create environments where people do their best work, supporting highly skilled engineers, operators, designers, and client support. You build the processes where the best products emerge, quality is built in, and users are delighted. You are more than a programmer: you are a systems expert, a product creative, and a business analyst who helps the team grow in judgment, skill, and talent.

What you will do

• Lead the direction of a product team in partnership with a Product Lead (two-in-the-box).
• Design and build production-grade, Cephai-powered systems that bring the right context into the work.
• Work closely with operations, product, design, sales, marketing, and client support leaders to solve real client problems.
• Support highly skilled, motivated team members and keep raising the bar for the team.
• Help shape architectural patterns and engineering practices across the organization.

What you bring

You are an experienced software engineer who enjoys solving complex problems and helping teams succeed. You have significant experience designing and operating production systems, and you care about how software is built. Most of all, you think in systems rather than components, and you understand how architecture, teams, and product decisions interact over time.

Experience with Extreme Programming, continuous delivery, automated testing, and trunk-based development is a strong advantage. These disciplines matter most when building AI-enabled systems, where iteration speed and reliability both count.

Core technical expertise

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with fluency in Python, Node, TypeScript, and other programming languages.
• A proven ability to design and deploy production AI architectures that combine backend engineering with agent orchestration.
• Strong working knowledge of LangGraph, LangChain, and similar orchestration frameworks.
• Practical experience building AI-enabled applications with APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Bedrock, including managing context, streaming responses, and evaluation.
• Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search, and embedding pipelines.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals, including API design, microservices, and system integration patterns (such as service mesh, API gateway, and event-driven).
• Practical experience with cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, or equivalent), including serverless compute and containerized deployments.

Leadership and collaboration

• A demonstrated ability to lead through influence, setting direction and raising standards for quality and maintainability.
• Skill in explaining complex trade-offs and design decisions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to architectural strategy.
• A strong sense of ownership and curiosity, and the ability to deliver in a fast-moving, global environment.
• Strategic judgment in weighing build-versus-buy decisions with long-term organizational impact in mind.

Mindset and values

• A builder's mindset, comfortable with ambiguity and focused on delivering outcomes.
• A clear communicator who bridges technical and product conversations with credibility and empathy.
• A learning-first attitude, with curiosity about emerging models, frameworks, and best practices.
• A commitment to craftsmanship and continuous improvement in code quality, performance, and user experience.
• A belief in collaboration, knowledge sharing, and lifting others through mentorship.
• A conviction that intelligence recommends and people decide, and that the systems you build should keep it that way.

What success looks like

• AI-powered features ship faster, with greater reliability and lower operational complexity.
• Internal teams adopt the shared AI patterns and tooling you help define.
• Product and engineering teams see you as a trusted partner and technical leader.
• CINC's AI stack evolves with clarity, safety, and measurable impact for users.
• The work gets Less Tedious. More Meaningful. for the people who use CINC every day.