Principal AI Engineer Position - Columbus, OH

Principal AI Engineer Position - Columbus, OH
Location: Columbus, Ohio

Duration: 6-12 Months - Remote (But periodic onsite visits at Columbus-OH ~ Estimated 10%, quarterly)

Job Role:

You'll be the founding engineer, building and operating the AI platform and the first production applications on it - end to end, from infrastructure and orchestration through evaluation and monitoring. The engineering standards you set - repository structure, testing, deployment patterns - become the foundation every future hire builds on. This is a principal-scope role with a genuinely hands-on charter: you ship code every week and own it in production.

What you'll do

• Build and operate the governed enterprise MCP gateway and Azure AI environments
• Implement SAP identity passthrough in partnership with the IT/SAP organization
• Own CI/CD for AI assets, plus the evaluation and observability harness with cost and usage telemetry instrumented from day one
• Ship the first production AI use case, then the prioritized portfolio: retrieval, grounding, and agentic workflows, released behind evaluation gates
• Co-build alongside an enterprise integration partner during the initial platform build, internalizing patterns so the capability stays in-house
• Define the function's engineering standards, tooling, and practices, and serve as technical lead as the team grows

Your first 90 days

• Have the gateway carrying production traffic for the first use case in a Hexion-owned Azure environment
• See evaluation scores and telemetry flowing from day-one instrumentation
• Publish the engineering standards the team will build on

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering; strong Python and/or TypeScript
• Deep Azure expertise: infrastructure-as-code (Bicep or Terraform), networking, identity, container platforms, Azure AI services
• Production LLM or agentic systems you personally built and ran end to end - data flows, orchestration, deployment, evaluation, incident response - be prepared to walk through the most recent one
• Evaluation engineering: you design and build eval suites - datasets, metrics, regression tests wired into CI - and hold them as release gates, not demos
• Ownership of CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent)
• Identity-aware API and integration design
• Sound judgment partnering with vendors while keeping core capability in-house
• AI-augmented development as your default - we work with Claude and Microsoft Copilot, and expect them in your daily build loop

Preferred qualifications

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation experience
• SAP or other enterprise ERP integration exposure
• Experience with enterprise integration/automation (iPaaS) platforms
• Prior technical-lead or mentoring experience
• Regulated or industrial-sector environments