Principal Engineer - AI

Circana seeks a Principal Engineer - AI to lead the design and production delivery of agentic systems built on consumer-behavior data for brands and retailers. The role owns technical direction for a solution family, works with domain experts, and anchors a pod of engineers throughout the build.

Responsibilities

• Lead agentic-system development from domain discovery to production use. Translate subject-matter expertise into intent ontologies, tool contracts, and evaluation sets.
• Engineer agent harnesses covering context management, MCP servers, guardrails, retries, graceful degradation, tracing, and replay. Establish evaluation infrastructure using golden traces, regression suites, routing tests, and offline and online measurement.
• Define reusable services, tools, and conventions; review engineers’ work; and communicate progress and technical decisions to product owners, architects, security teams, executives, and clients.

Required qualifications

• A strong track record of shipping agentic systems for real users; production fluency with LangGraph, Google ADK, or Microsoft Agent Framework; experience with multiple model families and at least one major cloud AI stack.
• Mastery of context management, prompt design, plan generation, structured outputs, and tool design. Daily fluency with agentic coding tools, plus experience using specifications as a source of truth, evaluations in continuous integration, prompt and tool versioning, and trace-driven debugging. Strong communication across technical and nontechnical audiences is required. No specific years of experience or education requirement is stated.

Preferred qualifications and tools:

• Consumer goods, retail, or large-scale measurement-data experience; forward-deployed or field engineering experience at an AI or data company; and public talks, open-source contributions, or technical writing. Claude Code is preferred.
• Listed technologies include Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and open-weight model families; GCP Vertex AI and Azure AI Foundry; MCP, A2A, AG-UI, and A2UI; and Python and TypeScript.

Location: The job header lists Pune, Maharashtra, India, while the description says the position can be located in Bangalore. No working arrangement or compensation is specified.