AI Platform Principal Engineer

In this role, you'll join the Waters AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) and lead the engineering team responsible for the platform that underpins our AI capabilities.

The team owns platform services, tooling, and operational practices that allow other development teams to build & run their own AI agents and solutions at scale. You'll work closely with architects, security teams, cloud-ops/infrastructure teams, and AI engineers to ensure the platform is secure, reliable, cost-effective, and easy to use.

This is a senior technical leadership position. You'll help set engineering standards, guide technical decisions, review critical designs, and support the growth of the engineering team while remaining hands-on where it adds the most value.

We're looking for someone with a strong engineering and platform background who has experience building, delivering, or operating AI solutions in a production environment. While AI experience is important, we recognize that technology is moving quickly and very few people have worked across every area of modern AI platforms. For the right candidate, we're happy to support development in areas where experience may be lighter, particularly as our own AI capabilities continue to grow.

Here at Waters, we look for people who enjoy solving difficult technical problems, work well with others, and focus on delivering outcomes rather than simply delivering technology.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the engineering team responsible for the AI platform and its supporting services.
• Own the reliability, security, scalability, and operational health of the platform
• Translate architectural direction into maintainable and supportable engineering solutions
• Implement and operationalize engineering standards through automated testing and quality gates, deployment tooling, and operational readiness practices
• Lead cloud platform, CI/CD, and deployment practices for AI workloads
• Define and maintain monitoring, logging, and observability standards across the platform
• Partner with security, infrastructure, and architecture teams to ensure compliance with enterprise standards
• Balance business priorities, platform improvements, operational stability, and technical debt when planning platform delivery
• Provide mentoring, coaching, and technical leadership to platform engineers
• Improve the developer experience for the AI engineering teams who build agents and AI solutions on the platform; providing reusable services, templates, frameworks, and documentation for them to build on
• Review high-risk technical changes and provide guidance on complex engineering decisions
• Evaluate new technologies and platform capabilities that could improve security, reliability, productivity, or scalability
• Promote knowledge sharing and engineering best practice across the AI CoE

Qualifications:

• 8yrs experience in software engineering, platform engineering, cloud engineering, machine learning engineering, or a related technical discipline
• Demonstrated experience providing technical leadership for enterprise platforms, distributed systems, or cloud-native solutions
• Experience building, supporting, or operating AI, machine learning, or generative AI solutions in production environments
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering principles, distributed systems, APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native development
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP experience also welcomed)
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code approaches, containerisation, and modern deployment practices
• Experience implementing CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and operational practices for enterprise applications or AI-enabled solutions
• Understanding of AI platform components such as vector databases, retrieval systems, orchestration frameworks, model serving, or related technologies
• Familiarity with agentic AI, AI orchestration frameworks, or emerging AI platform capabilities would be beneficial
• Experience establishing engineering standards, governance practices, and operational processes
• Experience in platform security, access management, risk management, cost and operational governance
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across engineering, architecture, business, and security teams
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping technical teams grow and succeed

Interested, but don't tick every box?

We're looking for experienced engineering leaders who have successfully built, operated, or supported AI solutions in production environments. We don't expect candidates to have worked with every tool, platform, framework, or architectural pattern listed in this description. If you have a strong background in software, cloud, platform, or machine learning engineering and can demonstrate experience delivering AI-enabled solutions, we'd encourage you to apply. We are committed to helping the successful candidate continue to develop their skills as our AI platform, tooling, and operating model mature.