AI - Principal Software Engineer
Cohu, Inc.1 month ago
USA (city not specified)Staff+
Base Salary
$175k - $225k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and ship agent tooling, RAG systems, infrastructure, and custom agent-facing UIs.
- Set technical direction for software integration, cloud infrastructure, on-prem hardware deployment, and air-gapped LLM inference.
- Develop reusable patterns for AI agents, workflows, tool integrations, hardware integrations, and retrieval architectures.
- Own Kubernetes-based infrastructure, including capacity planning, resource budgeting, scaling, namespace and cluster lifecycle, and production incident response.
- Guide and prioritize a small engineering team while remaining a hands-on software engineer.
- Drive cross-team architectural decisions, resolve technical escalations, and represent the team’s long-term technical direction.
- Evaluate model-serving and inference hardware technologies and potentially serve as AI Engineering lead.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent; Electrical Engineering or physics is acceptable with a strong software track record.
- At least 5 years of relevant experience; prior technical leadership or architecture experience is preferred.
- Senior-level ability to independently design, build, and ship production software.
- In-depth experience architecting distributed systems in Kubernetes and cloud environments with production ownership.
- Frontend and UI skills sufficient to ship a real agent-facing application.
- Strong individual and small-team leadership skills, including prioritization and delivery.
- Ability to drive cross-team technical decisions to closure and gain buy-in without formal authority.
- Working fluency with LLM and agent tooling, agent frameworks, MCP or equivalent tool-integration patterns, and preferably RAG components.
- Hands-on experience selecting, installing, and optimizing GPU/server hardware and inference stacks such as vLLM and TensorRT-LLM, ideally in air-gapped or on-prem environments.
- C++ or Python knowledge and prior production experience in either language is a plus.
- Semiconductor industry familiarity, particularly in the test/ATE domain, is preferred.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and comfort presenting technical direction to cross-functional and leadership stakeholders.
- Experience using AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, or similar is expected.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- 401(k) with company matching contributions.
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- Tuition assistance.
- Disability and life insurance.
- Profit sharing.
- Equal employment opportunity and reasonable accommodations are provided in accordance with applicable laws.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Cohu, Inc.
Cohu, Inc. builds semiconductor test handlers, contactors, and automated test and inspection systems used by IDMs and OSATs to validate and package chips. The company sells capital equipment, interface hardware, thermal subsystems, and related software and services. Founded in 1947 and headquartered in San Diego, California, Cohu is publicly traded on NASDAQ (COHU) and serves markets including RF front-end modules, MEMS, and automotive electronics.