AI Principal Engineer| Hybrid: Chicago, IL or NYC, NY

Let’s be unstoppable together!

Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high-quality data set.

At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives.  We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings. By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work.  Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®. This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at Circana. Learn more at www.circana.com.

Role Overview

Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. AI Principal Engineers build the foundations of that ecosystem. Leading a team, a principal designs and builds the platforms everything else runs on: Circana's agent platform, and a software factory where agents build, test, and ship software while people set intent and approve what goes live. Principals set the patterns and standards other teams build on, own the hardest technical problems, and are the engineers other senior engineers turn to. When a critical initiative needs it, a principal also leads from the front: embedded with a business team for a defined push, working alongside Forward Deployed Engineers, then folding what they learned back into the platform.

Job Responsibilities

Design and build Circana's agent platform and the ecosystem around it: runtime, agent identity and access, tool and MCP registries, context and memory services, evaluation, observability, and deployment.

Build a dark software factory: largely autonomous pipelines in which agents turn specs into tested, reviewed, and deployed software, with humans setting intent and approving releases.

Lead a team of engineers building these systems: set technical direction, review the work, mentor, and raise the bar.

Own harness engineering: context management, tool contracts and MCP servers, guardrails, retries and graceful degradation, tracing and replay.

Establish evaluation as infrastructure: golden traces, regression suites, routing tests, offline and online measurement, and release gates.

Own the shared patterns, services, and conventions other teams build on, so every build is faster than the last.

Lead embedded engagements when needed, for example a 90-day push with a business team to take an entire workflow agentic, and turn what worked into platform capability.

Represent the work credibly to product owners, architects, security, executives, and client stakeholders.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience, including designing and owning a platform or shared system used by many teams, and setting technical standards that other senior engineers adopted.

Has built platform infrastructure end to end: runtime and deployment, identity and access, multi-tenant services, and observability.

A strong track record of designing and shipping agentic systems into production for real users.

Deep production fluency with at least one major agent orchestration framework: Google ADK, LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Claude Agent SDK, or similar.

Production experience across multiple model families, with clear judgment on when to reach for which.

Production experience on at least one major cloud AI stack.

Integration depth: has connected platforms to enterprise systems of record, including legacy ones.

Command of the agentic development lifecycle: specs as source of truth, evals as continuous integration, prompt and tool versioning, trace-driven debugging, and sandboxed execution of agentic workloads at scale.

Daily fluency with agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.

Communication that lands at every altitude: engineers, domain experts, and senior executives alike.

Preferred

Has built or led AI-driven software delivery: coding agents in CI, automated review, spec-to-deploy pipelines, developer platforms.

Prior forward deployed or field engineering experience at an AI or data company.

Public artifacts: talks, open source, technical writing.

Consumer goods, retail, or large-scale measurement data background.

Tech Stack & Tools

Experience with any of the platforms and frameworks below is relevant; skills transfer readily between them.

Platforms: GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry, on-prem

Orchestration: Google ADK, LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Claude Agent SDK

Models: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, open-weight families

Retrieval: embeddings, vector stores, RAG pipelines

Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Argo, or similar)

Protocols: MCP, A2A, OpenAPI, OAuth 2.0, SSE, gRPC

Engineering: Python, TypeScript, Claude Code

Delivery: evaluation harnesses as CI, tracing and observability tooling, sandboxed agent execution, CI/CD integration

Circana Behaviors

Beyond technical skills, experience, and role-specific attributes, these shared behaviors are fundamental to our culture and success. We seek individuals who consistently demonstrate and champion these behaviors in their daily work:

Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.

Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.

Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.

Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.

Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.

Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.

Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.

Location: This position can be located in the following area(s): Chicago, IL (Hybrid) or NYC, NY (Hybrid)

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is $200,000 USD to $250,000 USD.

This job is also eligible for bonus pay.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice . Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.

You can apply for this role through the Circana careers website or Intranet site for internal candidates. This role is subject to AI-assisted screening. Circana uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assess resumes for alignment with job requirements by helping locate details in resumes that relate to the job description.

This position is expected to remain open for approximately 30 days and may close earlier if sufficient qualified candidates are identified.