Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. iHerb is a company committed to making healthy living accessible to everyone, and they are seeking a Principal Engineer for their AI Platform. This role involves defining the AI platform architecture, leading the development of shared AI systems, and ensuring high technical standards across the engineering organization.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the AI platform architecture: retrieval infrastructure, model lifecycle, evals framework, guardrails, and GenAI product feature design
- Lead the build of the shared AI platform layer consumed by all AI product features and reusable by internal business teams
- Hands-on contributor: build production AI systems, write proofs of concept, and validate architecture through working software
- Set and enforce technical standards for the AI Platform team; drive architecture reviews and model quality reviews
- Coordinate with the Personalization team to define clear boundaries between the GenAI product layer and existing ML personalization infrastructure
- Contribute AI platform-specific patterns and lessons into iHerb's shared AI-driven SDLC golden path
- Drive the hardest cross-cutting technical decisions across multiple teams and shared platform services
- Establish and evolve iHerb's AI-driven SDLC golden path: shared standards, Claude Code skills, guardrails, and automation patterns
- Lead complex multi-team technical efforts by coordinating architecture reviews, aligning peer Principals and EMs, and resolving competing approaches
- Mentor and raise the technical bar across the engineering organization through code review, architecture review, and direct coaching of senior engineers
- Represent engineering in cross-functional conversations with product, data science, security, and infrastructure
- Feed architectural decisions into the shared knowledge base so institutional knowledge compounds across the organization
Skills
- AI-driven SDLC (required): demonstrated use of AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor to ship production systems. Can articulate workflow changes, quality tradeoffs, and guardrail strategies
- Architecture at scale: experience designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems across multiple teams and years: APIs, data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or high-traffic platforms
- Cross-org technical leadership: track record of driving architectural standards, technical roadmaps, or platform initiatives that span multiple teams or organizations
- Engineering quality mindset: deeply held opinions on code quality, observability, CI/CD, test automation, and maintaining velocity without accumulating hidden debt
- Communication and influence: able to write clear architecture documents, present to technical and non-technical audiences, and build consensus without formal authority
- Experience working in distributed teams across the US, China, and Latin America
- Production experience designing and operating AI platform systems: RAG pipelines, vector search, embedding infrastructure, or retrieval-augmented applications at scale
- Hands-on experience with LLM evaluation: building eval frameworks, defining quality metrics, and iterating on model and prompt quality using data
- MLOps experience: model deployment, monitoring, lifecycle management, and cost governance in a production environment
- Experience building and operating agentic systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent
- GenAI in production is required; prototype or research-only experience is not sufficient at this level
- High degree of accuracy and attention to detail
- Excellent organization skills and ability to multi-task
- Generally requires a minimum of 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion at senior, staff, or principal IC level
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field preferred, or a combination of education and equivalent work experience
- Able to identify, troubleshoot and resolve problems quickly using sound judgment, poise and diplomacy. Ability to use judgment and reasoning skills, and determine when to escalate issues, as required, in a timely manner
- Experience with Google Business Suite (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms)
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