Senior Principal AI Engineer
Vertex Pharmaceuticals2 hours ago
Boston, MA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$188k - $282k/yr
Responsibilities
- Build and own a bring-your-own-agents capability, including frameworks, SDKs, templates, interfaces, APIs, and guardrails.
- Architect shared AI and agentic platform services for model integration, prompt and workflow orchestration, tool use, memory, and task coordination.
- Define agent lifecycle capabilities for registration, configuration, testing, deployment, monitoring, versioning, and retirement.
- Deliver developer experience capabilities such as self-service onboarding, CLIs, sandbox environments, reference implementations, and documentation.
- Build integrations with foundation models, model gateways, enterprise tools, APIs, and related AI infrastructure.
- Develop evaluation, benchmarking, validation, observability, tracing, monitoring, logging, and alerting systems for AI workloads.
- Optimize production AI platforms for scalability, latency, throughput, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Establish architecture standards, governance controls, responsible AI safeguards, engineering practices, and reusable design patterns.
- Partner with product, data, engineering, security, and architecture teams to deliver enterprise-ready AI solutions.
- Drive platform adoption, mentor engineers, provide technical leadership, and evaluate emerging AI and agentic technologies.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, or a related technical field is required; an advanced degree is preferred.
- Significant industry experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, or AI platform development, including senior or principal-level technical roles, is required.
- Proven experience designing and delivering production-scale AI or machine learning platforms.
- Strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and cloud-native applications.
- Experience operationalizing machine learning, generative AI, or agent-based solutions in enterprise environments.
- Experience designing extensible platforms that enable internal teams to build or integrate custom applications, tools, or services.
- Deep understanding of software engineering practices including testing, CI/CD, version control, code review, and system reliability.
- Experience establishing standards, governance, and responsible-use practices for AI coding assistants and software engineering agents.
- Experience defining architecture, standards, and reusable services for large-scale enterprise environments.
- Experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing architecture across cross-functional teams.
- Strong communication, mentoring, technical leadership, and ability to balance experimentation with production discipline, security, and maintainability.
- Knowledge of AI/ML platform architecture, generative AI and large language model integration, agentic workflows, multi-agent systems, prompt engineering, workflow orchestration, model evaluation, AI observability, distributed backend engineering, cloud-native deployment, productionization, and reliability optimization.
- Preferred qualifications include an advanced degree, enterprise AI or developer-platform experience, extensible developer-pattern experience, self-service developer experience design, model gateways, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, vector databases, knowledge retrieval, AI governance, and experience in regulated industries.
Benefits
- Annual bonus and annual equity awards are available in addition to base salary.
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits are provided.
- Generous paid time off includes a week-long summer and winter company shutdown.
- Educational assistance programs, including student loan repayment, are available.
- The company offers a commuting subsidy, matching charitable donations, 401(k), and other wellbeing and financial benefits.
- The role is hybrid, as indicated by the #LI-HYBRID designation.