Principal AI Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer

Location: Hyderabad India
Years of Experience: 810 years of hands-on software engineering experience including building and scaling AI-powered systems in production

We are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to design build and scale AI-driven systems across our product platforms. This role is ideal for a deeply technical engineer who leads through hands-on contribution solves complex problems and drives the adoption of AI into real-world products.

The ideal candidate brings strong backend and cloud fundamentals mandatory experience with Java and AWS and proven experience integrating AI and Generative AI capabilities into production systems. You will work closely with product architecture and engineering teams to deliver reliable scalable AI-enabled solutions that create meaningful business impact.

• Design build and operate AI-powered applications including LLM-based services ML-driven workflows and intelligent automation.
• Integrate AI capabilities into Java-based backend systems and cloud-native platforms.
• Design scalable API-first services (REST & GraphQL) exposing AI capabilities across products.
• Implement data pipelines supporting feature engineering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) vector search and inference.
• Apply best practices for prompt design model orchestration evaluation and observability.

• Build and operate cloud-native AI systems on AWS including EC2 S3 RDS Lambda and EKS.
• Design containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS).
• Optimize systems for scalability latency reliability and cost efficiency.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or AWS CDK.

• Design and operate relational (SQL) and NoSQL data stores for high-scale distributed systems.
• Make informed trade-offs around data consistency availability and performance.
• Work with event-driven and asynchronous architectures where appropriate.

• Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end from design through production deployment.
• Influence system design and engineering standards across teams through design reviews and technical guidance.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the overall bar for AI and cloud engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with Product Data UX Security and DevOps teams to deliver AI-driven product capabilities.

• 810 years of hands-on software engineering experience building large-scale production systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java in backend and distributed systems.
• Mandatory hands-on experience with AWS including designing and operating cloud-native workloads.
• Strong experience with SQL and NoSQL databases in production environments.
• 3 years of experience building AI-powered applications including ML or LLM-based systems.
• Experience with API-first architectures (REST GraphQL).
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS).
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to own systems end-to-end.

• Experience with Generative AI platforms and frameworks (AWS Bedrock OpenAI APIs LangChain LlamaIndex).
• Experience with vector databases and semantic search.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices model monitoring and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience working in product-driven agile environments.

• Senior AI Engineer: Owns complex components and services; strong execution and technical depth.
• Principal AI Engineer: Owns multi-team technical initiatives; influences architecture and engineering standards across the organization.

• Real AI Impact: Build AI systems that ship scale and deliver customer value.
• Hands-On Leadership: Lead through deep technical contribution.
• Modern Stack: Java AWS Kubernetes (EKS) SQL/NoSQL and Generative AI.
• Collaboration: Work with strong product data and engineering partners.
• Core Values: Be part of a company that lives by Shattering Boundaries Sparking Greatness and Sharing Success.

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Our Culture:

Our mission is to empower people businesses and communities. A culture created less by what we do and more by who we are. When people ask what our team is about we point to our core values: champion customer success bring our best achieve together get stuff done and innovate every day. Were always on the lookout for new curious and capable people who can help us achieve our goal and we are seeking diversity in the people who join our team. We want to make sure that our company reflects the demographic of our customers clients and the communities in which we operate. So if you want to work for a friendly global inclusive and innovative company wed love to meet you!

What We Do:

Cornerstone is apremier people development company. We believe people can achieve anything whenthey have the right development and growth opportunities. We offerorganizations the technology content expertise and specialized focus to helpthem realize the potential of their people. Featuring comprehensive recruitingpersonalized learning modern training content development-driven performancemanagement and holistic employee data management and insights Cornerstonespeople development solutions are successfully used by more than 100 million people in 180 countries and in nearly 50 languages.

Cornerstone takes special care to ensure the security and privacy of the data of its users.

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Required Experience:

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