Principal AI Engineer (Technical Lead) jobs in United States
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Prophecy · 8 hours ago

Principal AI Engineer (Technical Lead)

positionSan Francisco, California, United States (Hybrid)
timeFull-time
remoteHybrid
senioritySenior Level, Lead/Staff
money$300K/yr - $350K/yr
date7+ years exp

Prophecy is a leader in AI-native data preparation and analysis, revolutionizing how enterprises manage data chaos. The Principal AI Engineer (Technical Lead) will lead AI projects, mentor staff, and ensure end-to-end delivery while enforcing MLOps and DevOps practices.

AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Cloud Data ServicesEnterprise SoftwareInformation TechnologySaaS
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H1B Sponsor Likelynote

Responsibilities

Led fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, RLHF), distillation, quantization with PyTorch/HuggingFace
Shipped production agents (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI)
Expert in RAG, vector DBs, prompt orchestration
Codes weekly prototypes, debugs, unblocks
Mentors staff; remains top expert on toughest problems
Led 2+ open-ended, user-facing AI projects from ambiguity to impact
Owned vision, roadmap, MVPs
Partnered with PMs/execs on metrics, priorities, trade-offs
Presented to C-suite/board
Enforced MLOps/DevOps for agents: CI/CD, canaries, observability, A/B prompt testing
Championed reproducibility, governance, code reviews, on-call culture
Built multi-agent systems (e.g., ETL automation, code-gen loops)
Created eval harnesses
Beat reliability/latency benchmarks
Architected 10k+ RPS backends (AWS/GCP, k8s, serverless)
Fluent in Python, Go, Java, Scala
Owns APIs, async, optimization
0→1 and 1→10: shipped greenfield, scaled 100x
Drives rapid prototyping with production rigor

Qualification

ML/LLM fine-tuningProduction agents deploymentMLOps/DevOps processesCloud architecturePython programmingBig-data enginesMulti-agent systemsOpen-source contributionsTechnical leadershipCross-functional collaborationMentoring staff

Required

7+ years in industry
Led fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, RLHF), distillation, quantization with PyTorch/HuggingFace
Shipped production agents (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI)
Expert in RAG, vector DBs, prompt orchestration
Codes weekly prototypes, debugs, unblocks
Mentors staff; remains top expert on toughest problems
Led 2+ open-ended, user-facing AI projects from ambiguity to impact
Owned vision, roadmap, MVPs
Partnered with PMs/execs on metrics, priorities, trade-offs
Presented to C-suite/board
Enforced MLOps/DevOps for agents: CI/CD, canaries, observability, A/B prompt testing
Championed reproducibility, governance, code reviews, on-call culture
Built multi-agent systems (e.g., ETL automation, code-gen loops)
Created eval harnesses
Beat reliability/latency benchmarks
Architected 10k+ RPS backends (AWS/GCP, k8s, serverless)
Fluent in Python, Go, Java, Scala
Owns APIs, async, optimization
0→1 and 1→10: shipped greenfield, scaled 100x
Drives rapid prototyping with production rigor

Preferred

ML/LLM work in code generation (e.g., Codex, text-to-SQL), semantic extraction, or knowledge graphs (e.g., Neo4j, Neptune)
Experience with big-data engines like Spark
Compiler development for languages like SQL, Python, or Scala
Optimization of ML models for low-latency, high-throughput production use
Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects (e.g., Hugging Face, PyTorch)
Expertise in retrieval systems or vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate)
Skill in evaluating tech and driving build/buy decisions

Benefits

Prophecy covers 99% of employee health insurance premiums and 75% for dependents
$200 per month towards remote work, wellness, gyms, massages, facials, and more!
Flexible PTO
Professional development allowance
Company sponsored Long Term Disability and Life Insurance, FSA/HSA, dental, vision, and more

Company

Prophecy

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Prophecy is the AI data prep & analysis platform. We make business data teams incredibly productive with AI agentic coworkers.
dateFounded in 2017
location
Palo Alto, California, USA
people-size51-200 employees
web-link
http://www.prophecy.io

H1B Sponsorship

Prophecy has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2022 (1)
2020 (1)

Funding

Current Stage
Growth Stage
Total Funding
$159.25M
Key Investors
Smith Point CapitalInsight PartnersSignalFire
2025-01-16Series B· $47M
2024-10-10Series B· $38.8M
2023-10-02Series B· $35M

Leadership Team

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Maciej Szpakowski
Co-Founder
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Vikas Marwaha
Co-founder
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Recent News

Dallas Venture Capital
Prophecy - Portfolio
2025-04-26
website-files.com
Dallas Venture Capital invests in Prophecy.io
2025-04-26
Singtel Innov8 Ventures
Portfolio
2025-04-26
Company data provided by crunchbase