{"id":888233,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai","title":"Principal Engineer - Applied AI","company":{"id":3193,"name":"Zeroto1","domain":"zeroto1.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/zeroto1","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Lighthouse","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T05:08:39Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T05:08:39Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":56,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":56},"description":"Responsibilities:\nSet and evolve the reference architecture across the Lighthouse control plane, Context Layer, data and execution adapters, workflow and agent runtime, evaluation, and production operations.\nDefine the contracts that keep the platform portable: canonical business concepts and tenant mappings; reusable.\nContext Modules and task Recipes; context requests, plans, packages, and traces; and the runtime boundary between context compilation and data execution.\nOwn security and deployment architecture for shared, dedicated, and customer-hosted environments, including identity, authorisation, tenant isolation, secrets, network boundaries, data residency, audit, and policy enforcement before retrieval and action.\nDesign reliable execution for deterministic and model-driven workflows, including long-running state, approvals, retries, idempotency, timeouts, partial failure, compensation, safe replay, and rollback.\nEstablish engineering standards for AI quality and system operations: evaluation datasets, regression gates, tracing, evidence and grounding, service-level objectives, incident learning, latency and cost budgets, and model or tool fallback.\nMake build-versus-buy and open-source extension decisions with clear upgrade paths; turn proven patterns into versioned services, APIs, connectors, SDKs, and solution templates rather than premature abstractions or customer-specific forks.\nPersonally design, implement, and review the components with the greatest architectural, security, performance, or operational risk; mentor engineers and communicate decisions clearly to product, business, and customer stakeholders.\nRequirements:\n8+ years building production software, including principal-level technical leadership across distributed, data-intensive, platform, or enterprise systems.\nDeep hands-on strength in Python, API and service design, relational data modelling, asynchronous and event-driven systems, and cloud-native operations.\nExperience defining architecture across multiple services and deployment modes, including identity, authorisation, multi-tenancy or customer isolation, observability, and failure recovery.\nExperience taking AI or ML systems beyond prototypes, including structured model outputs, tool use, retrieval or context, evaluation, guardrails, and production debugging.\nStrong judgment about system boundaries, data ownership, consistency, scalability, security, build-versus-buy choices, and how much abstraction is justified at each stage.\nA track record of leading through influence while staying close to implementation, code quality, production behavior, delivery sequencing, and customer outcomes.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2663,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","IT Consulting & Digital Transformation","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-14T05:08:39Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":0.4,"p_active":0.617,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":56,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["seen:56","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T17:21:27Z","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":849,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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":3193},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3193"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"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%2Fzeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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%2Fzeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai"},{"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/zeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzeroto1-principal-engineer-applied-ai"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":888233}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"zeroto1.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":888233},"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"}}