Job Description
Note:
The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Brightwheel is a technology brand in early education, dedicated to supporting teachers and engaging parents. The role of Sr. Principal Engineer, AI focuses on delivering AI-powered capabilities to enhance company-level outcomes, ensuring impactful production results rather than just prototypes. Responsibilities • Own outcomes end-to-end. Take responsibility for turning the biggest opportunities into shipped, adopted capabilities with clear measurement, iteration loops, and sustained improvement—not one-time launches • Define the AI technical direction.
Translate customer problems into a practical strategy, reference architectures, and a roadmap that multiple product teams can execute against • Make build-versus-buy decisions. Choose when to partner on models and tooling versus when to build differentiated capabilities (data flywheels, evaluation systems, workflow-specific intelligence) that create durable advantage • Lead by implementation. Rapidly prototype and ship reference implementations to prove feasibility, de-risk decisions, and raise the organization’s expectation for speed and ambition • Create the paved highway.
Build shared foundations—evaluation harnesses, retrieval and context patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and developer experience—so teams can ship reliable AI features repeatedly and independently • Raise the bar across Engineering and Product. Mentor senior engineers, lead design reviews, establish standards for quality and safety, and align stakeholders across teams to drive adoption Skills • Foundational AI Depth: You possess deep intuition for why models fail, gained from experience that predates the LLM boom.
You have likely worked with model training, fine-tuning, or classical NLP/ML, giving you the mathematical grounding to make high-stakes architectural decisions • 10+ Years of Engineering Excellence: You have end-to-end ownership of large, business-critical systems. You have moved beyond solving defined problems to identifying and solving 'intrinsically hard' challenges where the solution—and sometimes the problem itself—was initially unknown • Strategic Architecture: Experience formulating technical strategy at the organization or department level.
You have successfully designed systems that required execution across multiple teams or organizations • The 'Player-Coach' Standard: A track record of mentoring Staff and Principal engineers. You don't just review code; you raise the bar for hiring, design, and operational excellence across the entire engineering department • Production AI at Scale: A proven track record of shipping AI-powered products to production. You understand the 'last mile' of AI—evaluation, monitoring, and safety—and have built the tools that allow teams to sleep soundly at night • Experience earlier in your career with model training, fine-tuning, classical machine learning, or natural language processing—enough to have intuition for why models fail and how data and evaluation shape outcomes • A portfolio of real work (open-source, demos, writing, talks, or shipped side projects) that shows taste, velocity, and how you think about applied AI systems end-to-end • Experience building shared internal platforms or frameworks (for example evaluation services, retrieval infrastructure, policy and safety guardrails, observability tooling) that became the default path for multiple teams • Formal training in computer science (4-year CS degree or equivalent depth in core CS topics) • A strong bar for operational excellence: secure-by-default design, performance and bolthires discipline, testability, incident readiness, and a track record of improving development, testing, and on-call practices for complex systems Company Overview • Brightwheel is a software platform for preschools and childcare providers.
It was founded in 2014, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is Company H1B Sponsorship • brightwheel has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 4 in 2025, 3 in 2024, 2 in 2023, 1 in 2022, 4 in 2021, 1 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Apply tot his job