[Remote] Principal AI Platform Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Nextdata is a company focused on making enterprise data usable for both humans and AI agents. The Principal AI Platform Engineer will design and build interfaces and systems that allow AI systems to effectively discover and use data products while ensuring safety and compliance with governance policies.ResponsibilitiesDesign agentic data interfaces that let AI agents discover, understand, and safely use data productsBuild MCP-compatible endpoints, tools, and APIs for governed AI/data accessDevelop data agents that reason over metadata, semantics, contracts, policies, and data outputsMake data products AI-ready across SQL, documents, vectors, graphs, APIs, and semantic modelsBuild safe query and action flows with access checks, policy enforcement, approvals, and audit trailsWork on retrieval, semantic search, tool selection, context construction, and answer groundingDefine reusable patterns for agent-readable metadata, structured outputs, observability, and evaluationPartner with product, engineering, and customer teams to turn enterprise AI/data use cases into product capabilitiesSkillsStrong experience in data engineering, data platforms, distributed systems, or enterprise data infrastructurePractical experience building AI-enabled data systems, retrieval systems, semantic layers, or data agentsStrong knowledge of SQL, APIs, documents, vector search, knowledge graphs, and metadata systemsExperience with agentic interfaces, tool-calling, MCP or similar protocols, function calling, or AI backendsGood understanding of governance: access control, policies, contracts, lineage, data quality, PII protection, and auditabilityAbility to build production systems that are safe, observable, testable, and reliableStrong Python skills and comfort working across backend services, data systems, APIs, and AI frameworksProduct-minded judgment: you know the difference between a demo, a customer-specific workaround, and a reusable platform capabilityComfort working in ambiguous areas where the patterns are still being definedExperience with data mesh, data products, semantic models, catalogs, governance platforms, or data marketplacesExperience with MCP servers, tool registries, LLM orchestration, RAG systems, or multi-step agentsExperience with Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Spark, DuckDB, Postgres, graph databases, vector databases, or lakehouse architecturesExperience with enterprise identity and authorization systems such as SSO, OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RBAC, ABAC, or policy enginesExperience evaluating AI systems for retrieval quality, tool-use accuracy, groundedness, reproducibility, and failure modesCompany OverviewNextdata offers an operating system for decentralized data at scale on an AI platform. It was founded in 2022, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 11-50 employees. Its website is https://www.nextdata.com.