Principal Al Engineer - India

Role overview

Principal Al Engineer - India at Cornerstone OnDemand

Responsibilities

• You will set architecture standards and patterns that applied ML and product teams build on top of, drive end-to-end implementation of production-scale platform components, and mentor and level up the senior engineers around you.
• Build and improve RAG pipelines: chunking strategy, embedding, Vector DB retrieval, generation, hallucination reduction, knowledge freshness, and multi-tenant data isolation.
• Design voice-based role-play assistants end-to-end and define quality metrics: WER, intent accuracy, turn latency, and task completion rate.
• Contribute to and extend the Message Streaming Platform that processes internal and external events across microservices at scale.
• Lead solution design for new AI services, set reusable patterns and cross-team standards, and build cross-functional alignment across product, operations, database, and security teams.

Employment details

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent experience). #LI-onsite
• Location: Hyderabad [India]

Additional role details

• Who We're Looking For Cornerstone is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to set the technical direction for the Architecture team that forms the backbone of our Cornerstone AI Platform.
• This is a high-ownership, high-influence role where you will architect the platform's core AI building blocks: the LLM Platform, RAG and Vector DB retrieval, the Agentic Platform and MCP integration, Message Streaming, API Gateway design, voice-based role-play assistants, and the Eval framework that every AI capability across the product suite depends on.
• Your design decisions shape how AI is built, scaled, and validated across the entire Cornerstone product line.
• If you want to work at the intersection of modern GenAI platform engineering and see your architecture power features used by a global workforce.
• In This Role You Will...
• Define and own the architectural foundation for the Cornerstone AI Platform, including authentication and authorization, API Gateway design, and the standards and patterns every AI service is built on.
• Architect and operate a multi-tenant LLM Platform used by multiple product teams, covering model routing, prompt versioning, guardrails, observability, and cost governance.
• Design and deploy the Agentic Platform and MCP integration layer, defining how agents plan, call tools, recover from failures, and connect securely to internal and partner systems.
• Own the AI Evaluation Platform, covering offline and online eval frameworks, regression detection pipelines, and the quality metrics every AI capability is measured against.
• Mentor senior engineers, conduct design reviews, and raise the technical bar across the team.
• You've Got What It Takes If You Have... 8+ years of backend engineering experience in Java (Spring / Spring Boot) and/or Python.
• Deep, hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating production-grade AI/ML and GenAI systems at scale.
• Proven depth in RAG pipelines, Vector DBs, LLM platforms, Agentic platforms and agents, MCP integration, voice-based assistants, and Eval frameworks and metrics.
• Strong cloud fundamentals on AWS (EKS/Kubernetes, IAM, DynamoDB, RDS, KMS, S3) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Expert-level API and platform design, including versioning, backward compatibility, multi-tenant isolation, and rate limiting.
• Proficiency across SQL (RDS), NoSQL (DynamoDB), Vector DBs, and caching (Redis).
• Demonstrated technical leadership: setting org-wide architecture standards, driving cross-team alignment, and mentoring senior engineers.