{"id":768166,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shakudo-principal-engineer","title":"Principal Engineer","company":{"id":687748,"name":"Shakudo","domain":"shakudo.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/shakudo-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"D","score":45,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0.917,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Menlo Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":156000,"max_usd":312000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1231},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PagerDuty","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Scala","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Windows","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-05T14:45:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T10:01:57Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":177,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":176},"description":"At Shakudo, we’re building the world’s first operating system for data and AI. We use the term “operating system” in the truest sense: just like iOS, Windows, or Linux, Shakudo’s end-to-end OS provides ever-evolving, fully automated, best-in-class open-source components tailored to each business’s unique needs.\nWe are seeking a senior Principal Engineer to join our Platform team and work directly with strategic customers to turn business problems into production AI and data systems. This is a highly technical, customer-facing role for someone who can move between customer conversations, system design, data engineering, AI application development, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and production support.\nIn this role, you will own the path from discovery to production: understanding the customer’s workflows and data, designing the solution, building and deploying it on Shakudo, and helping the customer adopt it in real operations. This is an outcome-based engineering role. A successful engagement is not a demo, a prototype, or an installation. It is a live, governed, adopted workflow that improves how the customer operates and is tied to a clear business result.\nResponsibilities\nEmbed with customer teams to understand business problems, workflows, data systems, constraints, and success metrics.\n\nDefine what success looks like for each engagement, including the target outcome, adoption path, production boundary, and measurable impact.\n\nTranslate ambiguous customer needs into clear technical scopes, architectures, implementation plans, and production outcomes.\n\nBuild and deploy AI and data applications on Shakudo, including agentic workflows, RAG systems, data pipelines, integrations, evaluations, and operational automation.\n\nDesign and implement production data workflows across enterprise environments, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data quality, access control, and observability.\n\nDeploy and operate Shakudo in complex customer environments, including cloud, hybrid, on-prem, private cloud, and air-gapped infrastructure.\n\nWork hands-on with Kubernetes, containers, networking, storage, identity, secrets, observability, and production troubleshooting.\n\nPartner with customer engineering, platform, data, and security teams to get systems live, governed, adopted, and measurable.\n\nParticipate in PagerDuty-based production support for customer deployments, including incident response, escalation, root-cause analysis, and follow-up remediation.\n\nTurn customer-specific work into reusable patterns, playbooks, templates, and product feedback for Shakudo.\n\nQualifications\n8+ years of experience across software, data, platform, infrastructure, or AI engineering roles, including:\n3+ years building LLM/AI applications such as RAG, agents, evaluations, workflow automation, or production AI systems.\n\n5+ years working with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure in production environments.\n\nStrong experience with major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.\n\nStrong data engineering background, including pipelines, orchestration, transformation, data quality, access controls, and production data workflows.\n\nExperience with a modern data stack such as Spark, Airflow, Databricks, Snowflake, or similar.\n\nExperience building or deploying AI, data, or automation solutions in highly regulated or operationally complex industries, such as financial services, government, healthcare, energy, agriculture, supply chain, or industrial operations.\n\nAbility to apply AI to real-world operational data, such as sensor data, geospatial data, logistics data, ERP data, field operations data, or forecasting data.\n\nProficiency in at least one production programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, Java, or Scala.\n\nStrong systems thinking across data, users, permissions, workflows, infrastructure, governance, and business processes.\n\nExcellent customer-facing communication skills with engineers, operators, security teams, executives, and business owners.\n\nStrong ownership mindset: you care about production rollout, adoption, reliability, operational handoff, and measurable impact.\n\nWillingness to travel to customer sites as needed.\n\nA Plus\nExperience in a forward deployed, professional services, solutions architecture, customer engineering, field engineering, or technical consulting role.\n\nExperience delivering outcome-based customer engagements where success was measured by adoption, operational improvement, or business impact.\n\nExperience with data engineering, machine learning, or data science workflows, including feature engineering, model training, experimentation, evaluation, or production ML systems.\n\nExperience with on-prem, private cloud, regulated, hybrid, or air-gapped deployments.\n\nExperience with infrastructure-as-code and production operations.\n\nExperience working with enterprise security, compliance, audit, access control, and governance requirements.\n\nExperience integrating AI or data systems with enterprise applications, internal APIs, data platforms, or customer-specific operational tools.\n\nExperience leading senior technical stakeholders through architecture reviews, security reviews, implementation planning, and production-readiness decisions.\n\nAbility to identify repeatable product and service opportunities from customer-specific implementations.\n\nWhy Shakudo Stands Out\nWork with cutting-edge technologies in machine learning and high-performance computing.\n\nContribute to a platform that transforms how organizations leverage data and AI.\n\nJoin a dynamic team that values innovation, efficiency, and diversity.\n\nShakudo offers a high-impact package: competitive salary, meaningful equity so you share in the upside of transformational technology, and comprehensive health benefits that have you fully covered. We provide a flexible vacation policy-because building transformational technology requires supporting the people who build it. More importantly, you’ll work on technology that matters.\nThis role is based onsite to support the high security requirements of our clients and enable effective collaboration. We have a welcoming office environment, fully stocked with snacks, regular team outings (summer boat cruise, escape room, etc.), and a strong focus on maintaining a healthy work-life balance while doing meaningful, impactful work together.\nShakudo is an equal opportunity employer and encourages candidates of all backgrounds to apply. 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