Principal AI Engineer

Vixxo is seeking a full-time Principal AI Engineer to work out of our Scottsdale office - (In office Monday through Thursday - Work remotely on Fridays)

Position Summary:

The Principal AI Engineer is a senior technical role responsible for driving the organization’s bold shift toward an AI-first development culture. This position serves as a hands-on expert in modern AI-driven engineering practices, helping accelerate the delivery of new AI-enabled products and transforming how teams build, automate, and innovate. The Principal AI Engineer partners closely with engineering teams, business stakeholders, and IT leadership to design advanced AI solutions, modernize legacy systems, and coach teams in adopting AI-first principles, development patterns, and best practices. This role plays a critical part in establishing a shift from traditional software development approaches to AI-first, agentic, and automation-driven engineering.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

1. AI-First Engineering & Solution Development: Design, develop, and deploy AI-first features, automations, and system components using agentic, AI-assisted development workflows that dramatically accelerate delivery, experimentation, and modernization across the enterprise.
2. Coaching, Mentorship & Knowledge Transfer: Coach and mentor engineers on AI-first development practices, LLM integration, agentic system patterns, prompt engineering, and automation strategies. Advocate for and model best-in-class engineering practices to elevate team capability.
3. Business Engagement & AI Requirements: Work in tight, real-time partnership with business teams to rapidly identify, prototype, and deploy AI-driven automations and improvements, shortening feedback loops and enabling the business to directly evolve and extend solutions through AI-powered tools.
4. Cultural Leadership & AI Transformation: Champion an AI-first mindset across the organization by promoting innovation, driving urgency, and supporting a culture of curiosity and continuous learning. Develop internal AI tools, frameworks, libraries, and reusable assets that enable teams to work faster and smarter.

Supervision:

• Does this position supervise employees?
• Yes (future potential; no current direct reports)
• Does this position have any of the following responsibilities?
• Assign and/or check the work of others, but without other supervisory authority.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Hands-on experience using Agentic and AI-native coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar, treating LLMs as active collaborators in design, coding, refactoring, and system evolution
• Significant experience as a Principal Engineer or equivalent senior technical role.
• Demonstrated success in building AI-first applications, including greenfield systems and modernization using AI.
• Comfort working in complex enterprise environments that include major commercial platforms alongside modern, custom-built applications (including .NET and Angular), using AI-first and agentic development practices to integrate with and modernize around them. Deep legacy expertise is not required; judgment, adaptability, and leverage through AI are. The team increasingly favors batteries-included frameworks such as Django (Python) to accelerate delivery and reduce cognitive load.
• Experience with LLM integrations, agentic workflows, RAG patterns, and AI orchestration frameworks.
• Strong prompt engineering capability.
• Familiarity with AWS and Azure cloud environments and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience in legacy modernization using AI-accelerated methodologies.
• Consulting or advisory background preferred.
• Strong communication and teaching skills.

Other Skills and Abilities:

• Strong customer orientation and ability to work cross-functionally.
• Experience documenting and communicating complex AI-driven solutions.
• Broad awareness of security, governance, and MLOps considerations.
• Comfortable operating across mixed cloud environments (Oracle Cloud, Azure, and AWS), using AI-assisted workflows to ramp into new platforms quickly. Depth in one cloud is sufficient; adaptability matters most.

Education, Certificates, Licenses, Registrations

• Bachelor’s degree preferred but not required. Equivalent experience accepted.
• AI or cloud certifications are a plus.

Physical Demands:

• Standard physical requirements for office work; occasional lifting up to 15 lbs.

Travel:

• Up to 5% on overnight travel.

Work Environment:

• Primarily office-based with hybrid flexibility; typical office noise and conditions.