Remote Principal AI Engineer

Description:

• Apollo.io is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead the design and deployment of advanced agentic systems, AI assistants, and LLM-powered features.
• This role is crucial to Apollo’s AI roadmap, responsible for the architecture and productionization of intelligent systems that support thousands of go-to-market teams globally.
• The Principal AI Engineer will serve as a technical thought leader within the AI Engineering team, collaborating with product, backend, and platform leaders to enhance Apollo’s competitive edge in applied AI.
• Responsibilities include architecting autonomous AI agents, building reusable components for workflow automation, and evolving the in-house platform for scalable LLM deployments.
• The role also involves leading the design of conversational AI interfaces, developing personalized search systems, and driving innovation in email intelligence.
• The engineer will optimize latency and cost in production-grade applied AI, define testing methodologies, and create feedback loops to improve system performance.

Requirements:

• Candidates must have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on applied LLM or agentic AI systems.
• Proven success in deploying LLM-powered products at scale is required, not just prototypes or internal tools.
• Deep expertise in backend and systems engineering, particularly with Python, distributed systems, and scalable APIs, is essential.
• Familiarity with orchestration frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex is necessary.
• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, embedding models, and semantic search tuning is required.
• Candidates should have experience managing performance across cloud providers like AWS Bedrock and OpenAI.
• Demonstrated experience in building multi-step agents and advanced prompting strategies is essential.
• A strong understanding of AI system evaluation, A/B experimentation, and feedback loop pipelines is required.
• Experience in designing reliable LLM systems in production and managing logging and monitoring for live AI systems is necessary.

Benefits:

• The position offers a competitive salary range of $200,000 - $300,000 USD, which may include equity and performance bonuses.
• Additional benefits include a 401(k) plan, at least 10 paid holidays per year, flexible PTO, and parental leave.
• Employees will have access to an employee assistance program, wellbeing benefits, global travel coverage, and various insurance options including life, AD&D, STD, and LTD.
• Apollo.io fosters a culture of continuous improvement and provides resources and support for personal and professional growth.
• The company encourages collaboration, bold ideas, and the freedom to experiment, allowing employees to make a significant impact in their roles.