Principal Engineer, AI

About the role

Meijer is hiring a Principal Engineer, AI for its AI team within Meijer Technology, which builds and operates the company's enterprise AI assistant and the shared services supporting AI-enabled applications. The role defines the platform's reference architecture, evaluates and selects platform technologies, sets engineering standards for how AI capabilities are built, deployed and governed, and advises technology leadership on technical direction, risks and trade-offs. It follows a hybrid schedule: Monday to Wednesday in the Grand Rapids, Michigan corporate office, Thursday to Friday remote.

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain the reference architecture for the enterprise AI platform and lead the evaluation and selection of platform technologies such as API gateway, service catalog, identity, evaluation and observability components.
• Set engineering standards for packaging, deploying, securing and monitoring AI capabilities across cloud and on-premises environments, and lead major initiatives such as modernizing existing AI applications while preserving safety controls.
• Own problem resolution: identify recurring issues from incident trends, lead root cause analysis for major incidents and drive architectural and process fixes.
• Set standards for incident severity, on-call practice and post-incident review, and set the technical standard through design review, mentoring and written guidance.
• Lead the technical side of vendor relationships and platform evaluations with finance and information security, and advise technology leadership on architecture decisions and emerging technologies.
• Produce concrete deliverables: reference architecture, prototypes, evaluation criteria and written standards.
• Design, develop, test and deploy application features and services, including integrations with enterprise systems and data sources, and build AI-enabled capabilities such as retrieval components, tool and API integrations and automated evaluation of AI-generated responses.
• Build and deploy containerized services through CI/CD pipelines, monitor them in production, write automated tests and take part in the on-call rotation.
• Use AI-assisted development tools, write technical documentation, collaborate with product owners, analysts, security and partners, and take part in Agile ceremonies and planning.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating platforms used by other engineering teams, including ownership of an enterprise-scale architecture.
• Experience building or operating an AI or machine learning platform in production, such as model serving, inference, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, agent runtimes or AI governance tooling, including systems predating generative AI.
• Experience designing for hybrid cloud and on-premises deployment, and leading incremental modernization of live production systems.
• Experience in a regulated or high-trust environment with working knowledge of identity, access control, auditability and incident response.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools in daily work, and excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred qualifications

• Depth in a cloud AI platform such as Azure AI Foundry, Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI.
• Experience with the Model Context Protocol ecosystem and serving open-weight models.
• Knowledge of data platforms such as Databricks and ServiceNow.
• Retail or frontline-workforce domain experience, and experience with Agile at scale.

What we offer

• Weekly pay and scheduling flexibility.
• Paid parental leave and paid education assistance.
• Team member discount and development programs for advancement.