Principal Engineer – Enterprise AI Agents

This is a moment of change — and tremendous potential. Do you want to be part of shaping what’s next in human-AI collaboration?

Sema4.ai enables the enterprise to build, run, and manage intelligent AI agents that transform how people work. As Generative AI shakes up every industry, enterprises are looking for ways to unleash stunning productivity gains; deliver efficiencies with profound effects on the bottom line; accelerate innovation pipelines; and disrupt new markets.

What you can expect from us:

• Unleash stunning productivity gains
• Deliver efficiencies with profound effects on the bottom line
• Accelerate your career growth by working with leading-edge technology, pioneering customers, and world-class colleagues

Recently named to Business Insider’s list of the most promising startups of 2024, Sema4.ai is funded by tier 1 venture capital firms–the ones who backed household names like Uber, Snapchat, Instagram, and Zendesk. Our founders are innovators in open source, big data, and automation-as-code. As previous leaders of the Enterprise Hadoop offering at Hortonworks and Cloudera, the Sema4.ai team has already managed a quarter of the world’s data with deployments in 90+ countries.

The Opportunity

At Sema4.ai, we're building an Enterprise AI Agent platform that reinvents how knowledge work happens—how people and AI agents collaborate to get work done better and faster. You'll join a distributed, fast-moving team and steer the technical direction of the Agent, the very core of our product.

We're hiring a Principal Engineer who is a strong team player and can operate effectively in a distributed product organization. You thrive in a fast-paced, results-driven environment where everyone is expected to take initiative, make decisions, and assume ownership of their work.

Who You Are

• GenAI Expert: You understand how to use LLMs (and other cutting-edge models) to do useful work. You know the common challenges around using LLMs in enterprise settings, the most useful context management strategies, prompting strategies, and the nitty-gritty API-level details such as tool use, prompt caching, multi-modality, structured outputs, model-provider-specific differences, etc. You know the difference between top-p and temperature and you’ve maybe seen emerging works (like min-p). You use this significant base of understanding to drive useful outcomes in unique ways that non-experts in GenAI simply can’t.
• Technical Visionary: You can see around corners in the AI space. You understand not just current capabilities but where the field is heading. You make architectural decisions that will scale as models improve. You’ve grown with the field, tracking key changes, and implementing them when they make sense (avoiding the hype and creating clarity through your vision). You’re the kind of person who may have skipped on GraphRAG after a closer look, anticipated the emergence of truly long context models, and paid close attention to Anthropic’s excellent blog on SOTA retrieval techniques.
• High-Velocity Learner: You thrive in ambiguity. You can enter a new domain, align your team, and ship something useful faster than most. 
• Execution-Oriented: You have a bias toward making things real. No hand-offs, no silos. You're there from discovery to deployment, ensuring your team delivers.

What You’ll Do

• Deliver Customer Value: Translate customer needs into production-ready solutions, ensuring optimal quality, security, and performance at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
• Architect & Design: Own the end-to-end technical architecture for core pieces of our AI Agent platform.
• Lead & Mentor: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and innovation.
• Set Standards: Influence engineering best practices, from code review to release processes, ensuring a stable and efficient deployment ecosystem.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including several years in technical leadership positions.
• Leadership & Communication Skills: Excellent ability to convey complex ideas to technical and non-technical audiences alike. Comfortable leading projects, influencing stakeholders, and mentoring senior engineers in distributed environments.
• Mastery of Python (and Beyond): Deep experience in Python, with a solid background in at least one other prominent language (e.g., Go, JavaScript, Rust).
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Comfortable working with complex, high-availability distributed systems running on containerized environments such as Kubernetes.
• Security-Focused Mindset: Track record of integrating security best practices in architecture, code, and deployment, with solid knowledge of enterprise compliance and governance.
• Problem-Solving & Adaptability: Adept at navigating ambiguous requirements, focusing on outcomes, and rapidly iterating to deliver high-quality solutions in a demanding, results-driven setting.

How We Work

• We move fast and value autonomy.
• We write to think and communicate clearly.
• We build together, not in silos.
• We value execution over plans, and customer impact over internal consensus.
• We work remotely across time zones, with flexible schedules and clear communication expectations.

Why Sema4.ai

• We’re early—but shipping fast and solving real problems.
• You’ll have direct influence on product, culture, and strategy.
• You’ll join a driven, humble team of builders focused on impact.
• Founding team that has already “done it” before, with world-class investors.

Locations: US Eastern timezone, distributed team
Experience Level: Senior (10+ years of experience)
Team: Engineering
Reports To: Engineering Manager, AI Agents