Principal AI Platform Engineer

Nextdata

Principal AI Platform Engineer at Nextdata designs interfaces for AI systems using enterprise data. Collaboration across data engineering, AI engineering, and product architecture.

Posted 6/18/2026full-timeRemote • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsPythonSQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design agentic data interfaces that let AI agents discover, understand, and safely use data products.
Build MCP-compatible endpoints, tools, and APIs for governed AI/data access.
Develop data agents that reason over metadata, semantics, contracts, policies, and data outputs.
Make data products AI-ready across SQL, documents, vectors, graphs, APIs, and semantic models.
Build safe query and action flows with access checks, policy enforcement, approvals, and audit trails.
Work on retrieval, semantic search, tool selection, context construction, and answer grounding.
Define reusable patterns for agent-readable metadata, structured outputs, observability, and evaluation.
Partner with product, engineering, and customer teams to turn enterprise AI/data use cases into product capabilities.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strong experience in data engineering, data platforms, distributed systems, or enterprise data infrastructure.
Practical experience building AI-enabled data systems, retrieval systems, semantic layers, or data agents.
Strong knowledge of SQL, APIs, documents, vector search, knowledge graphs, and metadata systems.
Experience with agentic interfaces, tool-calling, MCP or similar protocols, function calling, or AI backends.
Good understanding of governance: access control, policies, contracts, lineage, data quality, PII protection, and auditability.
Ability to build production systems that are safe, observable, testable, and reliable.
Strong Python skills and comfort working across backend services, data systems, APIs, and AI frameworks.
Product-minded judgment: you know the difference between a demo, a customer-specific workaround, and a reusable platform capability.
Comfort working in ambiguous areas where the patterns are still being defined.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health insurance
Retirement plans
Paid time off
Flexible work arrangements
Professional development

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

data engineeringdata platformsdistributed systemsenterprise data infrastructureAI-enabled data systemsretrieval systemssemantic layersSQLPythonAPIs

Soft Skills

product-minded judgmentability to work in ambiguity