Principal Engineer, AI

A Career at HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do every day.

About the Role

Drive hands-on delivery of AI and Generative AI solutions that streamline workflows and deliver measurable business value—measured by hours saved and the breadth of users served. You will architect, develop, and maintain production-grade systems encompassing RAG pipelines, agentic tools, model routing, vector search, evaluation, and guardrails, and observability—all tightly integrated with internal platforms and enterprise datasets.

What You Will Do

· Automate high-impact workflows for internal stakeholders, prioritizing initiatives with the greatest time savings and broadest user reach.

· Deliver production-ready copilots and customer-facing applications for knowledge search, document summarization, intelligent recommendations, conversational analytics, and end-to-end workflow automation.

· Establish operational excellence through rigorous SLAs, latency and throughput optimization, robust safety and guardrail mechanisms, transparent evaluation frameworks, and cost-efficient inference strategies.

• Architect and develop scalable, high-performance data and AI systems that support GenAI use cases including RAG, agentic workflows, and model orchestration.

• Own the complete solution lifecycle: problem definition → rapid prototyping → rigorous evaluation → production deployment → ongoing monitoring.

• Implement guardrails (content policies, safety filters), prompt and version management, latency and throughput tuning, cost controls, load balancing, and fallback or model-routing strategies.

• Design and implement RAG pipelines over heterogeneous and often messy datasets—including requirements documents, lessons learned, business rules, and unstructured content.

• Select appropriate embedding strategies, chunking approaches, vector search configurations, rerankers, and routing policies to maximize retrieval quality.

• Develop agentic workflows leveraging LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP, and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols; build tooling for agentic coding use cases.

• Translate subject-matter-expert knowledge into robust, maintainable prompts; evaluate trade-offs between fine-tuning and prompt engineering.

• Work hands-on with large language models, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS), and agent memory systems.

• Containerize applications with Docker, orchestrate with Kubernetes, and automate CI/CD pipelines; manage infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform).

• Establish observability (Datadog, Grafana, LangFuse), evaluation frameworks, and model/data governance and access controls appropriate for internal enterprise environments.

• Bring experience building and maintaining data lakes and warehouses (Snowflake, Delta Lake, BigQuery, MS Fabric).

• Build internal copilots and customer-facing features using React, Node.js, and Python with REST or GraphQL backends.

· Collaborate closely with requirements, testing, validation, and platform teams; thrive in a fast-paced environment with clear, proactive communication and rapid iteration.

What You Need To Be Successful

• 8+ years of experience building production software

• Programming: Python (FastAPI, NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, Pydantic, Jinja2) and Node.js; strong proficiency with APIs and distributed systems.

• Model Providers: Working familiarity with connecting to inference providers e.g. AWS Bedrock, along with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta/Llama, and Mistral model ecosystems.

• Data & Storage: SQL and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB), Elasticsearch for search and analytics, and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Milvus, pgvector).

• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (S3, EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, Fargate, EKS/ECS), Azure, GCP, Databricks, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, Airflow, and Kafka.

• Operational Excellence: Load balancing, monitoring, and alerting (Datadog, Grafana, LangFuse), debugging production issues, and cost/performance optimization.

• Soft Skills: Strong communication abilities, product-oriented thinking, and the capacity to learn and adapt quickly in a dynamic environment.

• Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent professional experience

What Is Nice To Have

• Experience building ML Systems
• LLMs & Frameworks: Hands-on experience with at least one major deep learning or LLM stack (e.g., PyTorch/Transformers, TensorFlow/Keras) and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex.

What Makes You Eligible
* Be willing to work in an office located in Novi, MI (hybrid)
* Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment

What We Offer
* Access to employee discounts on world-class products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more)
* Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University
* Competitive wellness benefits
* Tuition reimbursement
* "Be Brilliant" employee recognition and rewards program
* An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development

#Hybrid

$ 125,250 - $ 183,700

HARMAN is proud to be an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard torace, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.