{"id":473082,"url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems","title":"Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems","company":{"id":31705,"name":"Inflection AI","domain":"inflection.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/inflection-ai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":250000,"max_usd":519000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":782},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Hallucination","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":true},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"vLLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-29T19:43:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T06:33:18Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":127,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":127},"description":"About Inflection AI\nInflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.\nInflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.\nAbout the Role\nWe're looking for a hands-on Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and technical direction of Inflection's agentic AI systems. You'll build production AI agents that can reason, retrieve context, use tools, and safely execute complex workflows while driving the design of scalable agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, observability, and reliability systems. Partnering closely with product, design, and engineering, you'll turn ambiguous problems into AI-native experiences, mentor senior engineers, and help establish the technical standards that power the next generation of intelligent agents.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild production AI agents that can plan, retrieve context, call tools, take actions, and recover from failures.\nDesign agent architectures for task decomposition, tool routing, memory, state management, human approval, and safe execution.\nCreate evals and observability systems for multi-step task success, tool-call accuracy, hallucination resistance, latency, cost, and failure modes.\nIntegrate agents with APIs, databases, SaaS tools, enterprise systems, internal systems, and user-facing workflows.\nImprove reliability through structured outputs, guardrails, fallback paths, monitoring, permissions, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls.\nPartner with product, design, and engineering teams to turn ambiguous user problems into shipped AI-native features.\nMake pragmatic model and infrastructure choices across proprietary models, open-source models, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and cloud environments.\nContribute to technical direction, engineering best practices, and the quality bar for agentic AI systems.\nOwn the technical direction of agentic AI systems, provide support and coaching to the team.\n What We're Looking For \n10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years at staff/principal or equivalent scope, and 2+ years building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems used by real customers.\nStrong Python or TypeScript experience.\nExperience building LLM-powered products, AI agents, RAG systems, automation workflows, or model-integrated applications.\nStrong backend engineering fundamentals, including APIs, databases, queues, testing, observability, cloud infrastructure, and deployment.\nExperience with tool/function calling, structured outputs, embeddings, retrieval, prompt design, and model evaluation.\nStrong product judgment and ability to move from ambiguous problem to shipped product quickly.\nAbility to work effectively in a fast-moving environment with ownership, collaboration, and high technical standards.\nHave a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements\nNice to Have\nExperience with LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, vLLM, or similar tools.\nExperience with agent memory, planning, multi-agent systems, browser automation, workflow automation, or AI copilots.\nExperience building eval pipelines, synthetic test cases, observability, guardrails, or AI safety systems.\nExperience with enterprise SaaS, productivity tools, developer tools, CRM, support, sales, finance, legal, or operations workflows.\nExperience working in early-stage, high-growth, or zero-to-one product environments\nEmployee Pay Disclosures\nAt Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $400,000.00to $550,000.00, depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.\nBenefits\nInflection AI values and supports our team’s mental, emotional, financial and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include: \nRobust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA\n401k matching program \nFlexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave\nParental, Medical and Family care leave \nGenerous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends \nSupport of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area","description_format":"text","description_chars":4890,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Flexible time off"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Conversational AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T13:51:31Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 4","filings_12m":4,"filings_prev_12m":2,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":247500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":4}],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.339,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":127,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T11:08:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":16527,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":31705},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=31705"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Finflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Finflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Finflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/inflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Finflection-ai-principal-engineer-agentic-ai-systems"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":473082}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"inflection.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":473082},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}