Principal Engineer, AI

brightwheel

Principal Engineer developing AI-powered capabilities to improve early education outcomes. Driving technical direction and mentoring teams in a mission-driven startup environment.

Posted 6/13/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $194,000 - $263,000 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own outcomes end-to-end. Take responsibility for turning high-leverage opportunities into shipped, adopted capabilities with clear measurement, iteration loops, and sustained improvement—not one-time launches.
Define the AI technical direction for your organization.
Drive build-versus-buy decisions. Recommend when to partner on models and tooling versus when to build differentiated capabilities.
Lead by implementation. Rapidly prototype and ship reference implementations to prove feasibility.
Help build the paved highway. Contribute shared foundations—evaluation harnesses, retrieval and context patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and developer experience.
Raise the bar across your organization. Mentor senior and staff engineers, lead design reviews for your teams, and help establish standards for quality and safety.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Foundational AI Depth: You possess deep intuition for why models fail, gained from experience that predates the LLM boom.
8+ Years of Engineering Excellence: You have end-to-end ownership of large, business-critical systems.
Architectural Strategy: Experience formulating architectural strategy at the organization level.
Mentorship and Hiring: A track record of mentoring senior and staff engineers and improving their skills, knowledge, and ability to get things done.
Production AI at Scale: A proven track record of shipping AI-powered products to production.
Nice-to-haves: Experience earlier in your career with model training, fine-tuning, classical machine learning, or natural language processing.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
Generous paid parental leave
Flexible PTO so you can recharge when you need it
Local retirement or savings plans (e.g., 401(k) in the U.S.)

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

AI technical directionarchitectural strategymodel trainingfine-tuningclassical machine learningnatural language processingproduction AIend-to-end ownershiprapid prototypingreference implementations

Soft Skills

mentorshipleadershipdesign reviewsquality standardssustained improvementcommunicationcollaborationproblem-solvingorganizational skillsdecision-making