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About the client A global provider of information, software and services for professionals in regulated, enterprise B2B industries. With engineering teams across India, the US and Europe, the organization is investing in a shared AI platform that other teams build on, and is raising its delivery standard by making AI-assisted development the default way of working. It is an agile, collaborative workplace where engineers own outcomes end-to-end and influence across teams.

About the role

As Principal AI Platform Engineer, you will be the most senior individual-contributor engineer on the Platform Engineering Team. You will set the technical direction for the organization's AI platform and design the production-grade Python services, Web APIs and SDKs that other engineering teams build on. You will also raise the delivery bar by defining how AI-assisted development (e.g., GitHub Copilot) is used across the team.

You lead through architecture, standards and influence, not headcount. This is a contract-to-hire engagement.

Responsibilities

- Own the AI platform architecture end-to-end: target design, technology selection and migration path.
- Build secure, scalable Python Web APIs (e.g., FastAPI) with authentication, rate limiting and observability.
- Design, version and publish Python SDKs used by multiple teams, with semantic versioning, deprecation policy and documentation.
- Set the standard for AI-assisted development: tooling, review practices, guardrails and measured productivity gains.
- Build,



deploy and operate applications on Azure and/or AWS using infrastructure-as-code.
- Develop LLM and RAG solutions, including prompt design, evaluation frameworks and guardrails.
- Define testing standards (unit, integration, contract, load) and enforceable quality gates in CI.
- Instrument services with logging, metrics and tracing; remediate bottlenecks; lead incident reviews.
- Partner with product, data, security and platform leadership on roadmap, requirements and SLAs/SLOs.
- Mentor senior and lead engineers and act as technical reviewer of record for significant designs.

Must have skills

- 12+ years in software development, 8+ of them in production Python.
- Principal/Staff-level scope: owned the architecture of a platform, service family or SDK used by multiple teams.
- 6+ years building Web APIs at scale (FastAPI, Django or Flask), including OpenAPI and contract-first design.
- 4+ years on Azure and/or AWS (Functions, App Service, AKS, Lambda, ECS/EKS) with infrastructure-as-code; Azure preferred.
- 3+ years of production GenAI: prompt engineering, LLM integration, RAG and evaluation frameworks you designed.
- AI Agent Development experience.
- Daily use of AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code), with concrete productivity gains and team rollout.
- 4+ years designing, versioning and distributing SDKs (PyPI or internal registry), including managing breaking changes.
- 4+ years with CI/CD (Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions), pytest and ruff/black/mypy.
- Enterprise security knowledge: OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, secrets management.
- Observability with OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor or CloudWatch, including SLIs/SLOs.
- 5+ years of SQL and NoSQL data design, plus hands-on vector databases (Azure AI Search, OpenSearch, Pinecone).
- Elite Python engineer who builds resilient, scalable systems and APIs.
- Platform architect who reasons about backwards compatibility, versioning, blast radius and total cost of ownership.
- Quality-driven and execution-centric: well-tested code, automation and fast delivery to production.
- Fluent professional English, able to explain trade-offs to senior leadership.
- Influences without authority; comfortable with ambiguity; pragmatic about speed versus technical debt.
- Based in India, the US or Europe and legally authorized to work there.




- Willing and able to convert to a direct full-time employee after the 12-month contract; contract-only candidates are not a fit.
- Willing to relocate to an office on conversion: India (Pune or Chennai), US (Houston, Minneapolis or Atlanta) or Europe (Amsterdam, Netherlands or Bari, Italy). Non-negotiable.

Nice to have skills

- Experience in regulated B2B information services (legal, tax, healthcare, finance, compliance).
- Agentic/multi-agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel) and MCP in production.
- Docker and Kubernetes/AKS at scale; multi-region and high-availability design.
- LLM evaluation and observability tooling (LLM-as-a-judge, tracing, cost/latency optimization).
- Open-source contributions, patents, publications or conference talks.
- AWS and GitHub Actions experience.
- Technical degree from a top-tier Indian institution (IIT preferred; NIT, BITS, IIIT also of interest); a preference, not a gate.
- Experience at FAANG/Big Tech or comparable high-scale product companies; a preference, not a gate.

Conditions

- Remote during the 12-month contract (India, US or EU); hybrid, 8 days/month in office, after conversion. Timezone UTC-6 (US CT) with a firm 6-hour overlap.
- Contractor role: 12-month contract, renewable, contract-to-hire with intended conversion to direct employment (India, US or EU).
- Full-time dedication (40 hours/week).
- BYOD (bring your own device) required.

At Andela, we know our strengths lie in our diverse community whose talents, perspectives, backgrounds and orientations we take pride in. Andela is committed to nurturing a work environment where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. Everyone has the right to work in a professional atmosphere that promotes equal employment opportunities and prohibits discriminatory practices.

Andela provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to factors including but not limited to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy (including breastfeeding), genetic information, HIV/AIDS or any other medical status, family or parental status, marital status, amnesty or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. This commitment applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including but not limited to hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. Our policies expressly prohibit any form of harassment and/or discrimination, as stated above.

📌 Principal AI Platform Engineer (India)
🏢 Andela
📍 India