Senior AI Engineer
h2o.ai · San Francisco, CA
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Jul 20, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior hands-on engineering role focused on designing and delivering production-grade AI systems for large enterprise clients across APAC. The work spans agentic AI architectures, LLM-powered applications, ML pipelines, and backend services, while also leading customer engagements end-to-end — from pre-sales through deployment. Suits an experienced AI/ML engineer comfortable owning technical delivery across complex, multi-stakeholder projects and communicating at both executive and engineering levels.
Senior level · 8+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 290 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 110–380
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The role is titled 'Principal AI Engineer' but the actual requirements — 8+ years of experience, senior technical delivery leadership within customer engagements, no explicit org-wide or cross-org architectural authority — align more closely with a Senior-level scope. 'Principal' here appears to be a customer-facing seniority label rather than a true top-of-ladder Principal IC role.
The SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role blends hands-on LLM/ML engineering (15-1252) with significant data science and modeling work (15-2051). The emphasis on shipping production AI services, APIs, and pipelines tips it toward Software Developers.
The posting states 'This position is based in San Francisco, Bay Area' and '#LI-Hybrid', indicating a hybrid on-site arrangement — not fully remote.
PyTorch, TensorFlow, and scikit-learn are listed together as ML framework options; PyTorch is emitted as the primary with the others as alternatives. LangChain and LlamaIndex are similarly listed as interchangeable LLM tooling options.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are listed as cloud environment options; AWS is emitted as primary with Azure and GCP as alternatives.
Docker and Kubernetes are listed together for containerisation; Kubernetes is emitted as primary with Docker as an alternative.
H2O.ai products (Wave, Document AI), AutoML, Kaggle experience, and regulated-industry experience all appear under the 'How to Stand Out From the Crowd' section — treated as preferred/nice-to-have.
No compensation figures are stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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