Principal AI Agent / ML Software Engineer (OCI)

Principal AI Agent / ML Software Engineer

Job Description

Senior Staff‑level technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next‑generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production‑grade agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large‑scale, business‑critical environments. The role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi‑team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands‑on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow‑up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI‑native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services. The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost‑aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior technical owner for OCI AI platform capabilities, including agent execution, inference systems, model serving, AI workflow orchestration, evaluation, and observability.
• Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi‑step task orchestration, and safe human‑in‑the‑loop escalation.
• Build production‑grade services for tool calling, agent memory, context management, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, vector retrieval, multi‑agent coordination, policy enforcement, and evaluation.
• Lead architecture across distributed services optimized for low latency, high throughput, GPU efficiency, reliability, cost, operability, and secure multi‑tenant operation.
• Define service boundaries, APIs, data models, state management, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, SLIs/SLOs, rollout strategies, and operational readiness criteria for AI platform services.
• Drive technical strategy across infrastructure, platform, security, data, and application engineering teams, converting broad goals into executable multi‑quarter plans and measurable milestones.
• Integrate AI agents securely and reliably with enterprise APIs, cloud services, databases, identity systems, secrets management, and external systems.
• Establish AgentOps and LLMOps practices for tracing, monitoring, eval suites, regression testing, experimentation, safety guardrails, prompt/tool versioning, and production reliability.
• Evaluate and operationalize emerging technologies in generative AI, agentic workflows, inference optimization, long‑context systems, reasoning models, AI developer tooling, and agentic‑first development.
• Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, design reviews, test strategy, deployment automation, incident analysis, documentation, and AI‑assisted development practices using tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems.
• Mentor Staff and senior engineers, raise architectural standards, and influence engineering practices across OCI without requiring direct management authority.
• Own critical production outcomes, including reliability, performance, security posture, cost efficiency, and supportability for the systems delivered.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6‑10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal‑level impact.
• Proven track record as a Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leader influencing architecture and execution across multiple teams.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating high‑scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.
• Hands‑on experience with production AI systems, agentic AI applications, autonomous workflows, tool‑using agents, multi‑step orchestration, or multi‑agent systems.
• Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.
• Deep understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompt design, structured outputs, function/tool calling, context management, RAG, memory, tool safety, and evaluation.
• Strong programming skills in Python and ability to contribute high‑quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.
• Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud‑native infrastructure, service‑to‑service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.
• Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of AI safety, governance, security, and operational risks for autonomous or semi‑autonomous systems, including data handling, access control, auditability, and human accountability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, resolve ambiguity, and influence senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing large‑scale GPU inference or training workloads for latency, throughput, utilization, availability, and cost.
• Experience building or operating model serving, inference gateways, agent runtimes, workflow engines, developer platforms, or internal AI productivity platforms.
• Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise APIs, databases, cloud services, vector databases, embeddings, retrieval systems, identity systems, and policy enforcement layers.
• Experience with LLM fine‑tuning, long‑context systems, reasoning models, model routing, caching, batching, quantization, or emerging generative AI research.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for agentic systems, including offline evals, online experiments, golden tasks, adversarial testing, regression gates, and observability dashboards.
• Experience using AI‑assisted software development tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems in large‑scale engineering environments.
• Track record of defining architectural standards, platform capabilities, or engineering practices adopted across multiple teams or organizations.
• Experience in enterprise, cloud infrastructure, regulated, security‑sensitive, or mission‑critical environments.

Disclaimer

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Salary and Employment Details

Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only. CA: Hiring Range in CAD from: $81,700 - $131,700 per year. Career Level - IC3. Vacancy Type - New Position.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Oracle is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Oracle will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to applicable law.

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