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Principal AI Engineer

VARITE

Job Location:

Glendale, WI - USA

Hourly Salary: USD 100 - 110

Posted: 8 September 2026 (6 hours ago)

Application Deadline: 6 December 2026

Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

VARITE is looking for a qualified Principal AI Engineer for one of its clients located in Glendale WI

WHAT THE CLIENT DOES
A global leader in smart building technologies energy solutions and industrial automation. The company provides products and services that optimize energy efficiency sustainability and performance across buildings industrial facilities and vehicles.

WHAT WE DO
Established in the Year 2000 VARITE is an award-winning minority business enterprise providing global consulting & staffing services to Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies. With 850 global consultants VARITE is committed to delivering excellence to its customers by leveraging its global experience and expertise in providing comprehensive scientific engineering technical and non-technical staff augmentation and talent acquisition services.

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer
Duration: 3-4 months
Location: Glendale WI
Work Mode: Hybrid
Pay Rate Range: $100.00 - $110.00/hr on W2

HERES WHAT YOULL DO:

Our client is bringing AI into the way the worlds most demanding buildings operate from datacenters and hospitals to pharmaceutical facilities and commercial campuses. We are transforming our smart building products into AI-native platforms capable of autonomous operations intelligent operator assistance and scalable AI deployment across cloud edge and on-premises environments.
This is a focused time-boxed engagement for a Principal-level AI engineer to embed within the Controls Software team and produce the foundational architecture assets and deployment playbooks that will accelerate AI adoption across our smart building platform at scale. While scoped as a 34 month engagement there is potential for extension based on scope evolution and mutual fit.
You will work hands-on alongside our engineers learn our platform (with full internal expert support) and apply your deep AI systems expertise to create artifacts the team will execute against beyond the engagement.

How you will work:

Collaborate daily with Controls SW engineers architects and product managers.
Partner with internal domain experts who will onboard you to the platform deep Client knowledge is not expected on Day 1.
Operate with principal-level autonomy: you drive the architecture validate assumptions with the team and produce deliverables iteratively.
Participate in team rituals (standups design reviews retrospectives) as a full team member for the duration of the engagement.

WHAT YOULL NEED TO WIN:
Required Qualifications:
AI Systems & Architecture

10 years of hands-on software or systems engineering experience with at least 6 years focused on AI/ML in production environments.
Proven experience designing and deploying AI/ML systems at scale from data ingestion through inference and monitoring.
Deep knowledge of MLOps: model deployment pipelines versioning observability drift detection and continuous improvement.
Experience with edge-to-cloud AI execution strategies: balancing latency cost and resiliency across distributed environments including LLM cost optimization (model selection caching routing).
Strong command of data pipeline architecture time-series data event-driven systems and API/microservices patterns.

GenAI & LLM

Hands-on experience architecting production GenAI applications across multiple LLM providers (e.g. Anthropic OpenAI AWS Bedrock Azure OpenAI and open-source models).
Deep knowledge of RAG architectures vector databases embedding pipelines and retrieval strategies at production scale.
Experience with agentic architectures multi-agent orchestration and tool-calling patterns including emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Experience with LLM observability and tracing instrumenting model calls tool calls and retrievals in production (e.g. LangSmith LangFuse or OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions).

Craft & Communication

Ability to produce clear durable architecture artifacts reference architectures decision records playbooks that engineers can execute without you in the room.
Comfortable working collaboratively in an embedded team model; can give and receive direct technical feedback.
Capable of running technical workshops or design sessions when needed.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience in industrial OT or IoT environments (building automation manufacturing energy or similar).
Familiarity with protocols such as BACnet MQTT Modbus or OPC UA.
Exposure to cybersecurity frameworks in OT environments (e.g. IEC 62443 NIST CSF).
Experience with AI use cases in buildings or critical infrastructure: FDD energy optimization predictive maintenance alarm intelligence.
Experience with containerization CI/CD tooling and observability platforms.
Experience operationalizing AI safety guardrails content filtering and governance controls in production GenAI systems.

What Success Looks Like:

A validated AI reference architecture that the Controls SW team can build against confidently.
Deployment playbooks that are immediately usable not aspirational documents.
Engineers who have meaningfully leveled up through collaboration with you.
Clear architectural foundation for our smart building platform to evolve toward autonomous AI-native building operations.

If this opportunity interests you please respond by clicking on EasyApply.

BENEFITS:
We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the health well-being and financial security of our employees and their families. Eligible employees may receive:

Health Insurance: Medical dental and vision coverage
Retirement Plans: Participation in a company-sponsored retirement savings plan.
Legal Service Plans: Offering access to attorneys for legal advice and representation.

Know someone who would be perfect for this role Refer them to us and if they are hired you could be eligible for our employee referral bonus! Help us grow our team with top talent from your network.
VARITE is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion gender gender identity or expression sexual orientation national origin genetics disability age or veteran status

Required Experience:

Staff IC

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