Principal, UX Designer / Engineer - AI Systems

Principal, UX Designer / Engineer - AI Systems OPPORTUNITY @ Nation's Largest Retailer

Onsite in EITHER San Bruno, CA or Bentonville, AR

Our client, the nation's largest retailer is looking for a Principal, UX Designer / Engineer - AI Systems, a newly created and critical position. As a key player within their dynamic Design Organization, you will have the extraordinary opportunity to shape the future of design and engineering by architecting, building, and deploying intelligent solutions that empower our teams and elevate the quality and speed of their digital products. Your impact will be immediate and far-reaching, transforming how design operates at scale and setting new industry benchmarks for innovation.

**Your Impact and Contributions:**

In this critical role, you will lead the charge in integrating sophisticated AI capabilities into our design ecosystem. You will be instrumental in bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and practical, scalable applications, directly influencing how our creative teams innovate and deliver. Your expertise will not only optimize current processes but also unlock entirely new possibilities for product discovery and user experience.

* Lead the implementation and productionization of AI systems, translating the strategic AI roadmap into scalable, secure, and resilient solutions that empower our Design Organization.

* Champion AI innovation by identifying and delivering high-impact opportunities where generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and intelligent automation can dramatically enhance creative workflows, accelerate product discovery, elevate design quality, and boost overall speed.

* Develop robust backend services using Python and Node.js, with a keen focus on performance, resilience, and observability. You will harden prototypes into production-ready, secure, and scalable services within client-approved infrastructure and guardrails.

* Ensure seamless integration with client identity, networking, data platforms, observability, and compliance controls (e.g., SSO, secrets management, service mesh).

* Establish rigorous gates for Proof-of-Concepts (POCs), including Service Level Agreement (SLA)/Service Level Objective (SLO) targets, error budgets, performance baselines, cost limits, capacity planning, disaster recovery strategies, and comprehensive runbooks.

* Drive continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure as code practices, and the smooth migration of prototypes across development, staging, and production environments. You will ensure operational ownership with robust alerting, on-call strategies, incident response, and a commitment to continuous improvement.

* Lead the technical design and architecture of internal tools and subsystems that empower designers, researchers, and content strategists. You will build scalable, reusable infrastructure for organization-wide AI applications.

* Guide engineers and architects through complex architecture decisions, rapid prototyping, and AI tool selection. Foster a culture of experimentation, technical excellence, and responsible innovation within the team.

* Represent the Design Organization in internal AI communities, share valuable learnings, and influence the adoption of AI best practices across the organization.

**Required Qualifications:**

* 12+ years in software or platform engineering, delivering production systems at scale.

* 7+ years combined professional experience in Python and Node.js (minimum 4+ years in each).

* 4+ years operating workloads in Kubernetes in production environments.

* 5+ years designing and operating both SQL (Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch) data models, including schema design, optimization, and scaling.

* Familiarity with vector databases and embedding stores.

* 2+ years building or operating ML/LLM-powered applications in production.

* 5+ years leading cross-functional architecture and mentoring senior engineers.

* Expertise in Kubernetes, Helm/Kustomize, GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), autoscaling, security, and cost optimization.

* Proficiency with CI/CD tools like Jenkins (or equivalent), Terraform/CloudFormation, blue-green/canary deployments, feature flags, automated testing, and rollback strategies.

* Skilled in REST and GraphQL API design, secure service-to-service authentication, rate limiting, quotas, and event streaming (Kafka/Pub/Sub).

* Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, tracing, metrics, log aggregation, SLOs, error budgets, and incident response.

* Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

* Strong communication skills and a portfolio of shipped systems with measurable impact.

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