Principal Engineer Applied AI
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Key skills for this role
About the Role
Client of Discovered MENA seeks a Principal Engineer to be a deep technical voice, setting direction across teams and leading architectural decisions for AI systems. You will be hands-on, write prototypes, and mentor senior engineers.
Key Skills for This Role
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction across multiple teams and lead architectural decisions.
- Actively read code, run experiments, write prototypes, and produce reference implementations.
- Use data to push back against unfeasible stakeholder demands and offer alternative architectures.
- Design systems for AI in production, managing non determinism, model drift, latency, and cost.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers to raise the organization's technical ceiling.
- Represent engineering realities to leadership and external partners.
Requirements
- Deeply hands on and current with modern AI and software engineering
- Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams
- Strong technical judgment and ability to make build/buy/partner decisions
- Experience with AI production systems, including non determinism, model drift, latency, and cost
- Ability to mentor senior and staff engineers
- Experience with data sovereignty, security, and compliance constraints
Full Job Posting
Discover the Opportunity
- Our client is building an elite, highly specialized AI engineering organization designed to put modern technology, data, and frontier AI at the center of large scale, enterprise, and public sector operations.
- Their work spans frontier model evaluation and deployment, sovereign inference and serving infrastructure, retrieval and agentic systems, robust evaluation pipelines, and applied products built for mission critical dependency.
- We are small, high caliber, decisive, and unwilling to accept the gap that usually exists between AI demos and AI in production.
Discover the Role
- I am looking for a Principal Engineer to be one of the deepest technical voices inside our organization.
- You will set technical direction across multiple teams, lead the architectural decisions that no single team can own on its own, and raise the technical ceiling of the engineering organization.
- This is a senior, highly technical individual contributor role.
- Crucially, this role requires a strong technical backbone.
Key Responsibilities
- Deeply Hands On & Current: Actively read code, run experiments, write prototypes that settle architectural debates, and produce reference implementations.
- Data Driven Pushback: Use concrete benchmarks, metrics, and system constraints to push back firmly against unfeasible or high risk stakeholder demands.
- Alternative Architecture Design: When you say 'no' to a request, immediately deliver alternative technical solutions.
- Cross Team Technical Direction: Set the architecture, interfaces, deployment patterns, and standards for systems that span multiple engineering teams.
- Navigating AI Realities: Design specifically for the complexities of operating AI in production, managing non determinism, model drift, latency, and cost at scale.
- Multiplying the Engineering Bar: Raise the organization's technical ceiling by mentoring senior and staff engineers.
- Strategic, High Stakes Impact: Represent engineering realities to leadership and external partners, making technical trade offs legible to non technical leaders.
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