Principal, Applied Science

Responsibilities

• Own the agentic system architecture, including multi-agent coordination, tool taxonomy, and memory management strategies.
• Lead the AI evaluation framework by designing golden datasets, defining metrics (RAG quality, scoring accuracy), and managing CI/CD AI eval pipelines.
• Drive RAG architecture strategy, focusing on chunking strategies, embedding model selection, and hallucination mitigation.
• Own LLM integration architecture, including prompt engineering standards, gateway policies, and model version governance.
• Lead applied research initiatives in areas such as RLHF, Constitutional AI, and multi-modal learning.
• Define formal hexagonal AI adapter contracts to ensure seamless integration between Python AI services and Java domain cores.
• Mentor Applied Scientists and ML Architects through technical reviews of system designs and research approaches.

Requirements

• 10+ years of applied AI/ML experience, with at least 3 years at a Staff or Principal level.
• Deep expertise in LLM fine-tuning, alignment, and RAG system design (chunking, embedding, retrieval, reranking).
• Extensive experience with agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen.
• Mastery of Python and core ML libraries including PyTorch, Hugging Face, and LangChain.
• Strong understanding of distributed AI systems, including vector search (Elasticsearch) and feature pipelines (Kafka).
• Proven ability to design formal evaluation frameworks that align AI performance with business quality gates.

Preferred Qualifications

• Significant publications or open-source contributions in NLP, information retrieval, or agentic systems.
• Experience with preference optimization techniques like DPO or PPO.
• Familiarity with multi-modal AI applications involving images, documents, and tabular data.
• Prior experience in a product-focused AI role within a SaaS or platform company.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and generous stock options.
• Comprehensive medical insurance coverage.
• Opportunity to work alongside top-tier engineering talent from Silicon Valley's most successful companies.

About the Company

Tekion is disrupting the automotive industry with the first cloud-native automotive platform. Our ecosystem connects OEMs, retailers, and consumers through a seamless, transformative platform powered by big data, machine learning, and cutting-edge AI. With nearly 3,000 employees across North America, Asia, and Europe, we are enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever created.