Sailplane · 19 hours ago
Principal Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
10+ years expSailplane is an early-stage AI infrastructure startup focused on creating autonomous systems for managing AI data centers. As a Principal Engineer, you will design and develop infrastructure solutions, guide technical architecture, and work closely with founders to prioritize projects based on customer and market needs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Information TechnologyMachine Learning
Responsibilities
Design and evolve the control plane for agents: planning and execution loops, workflows, callbacks, and state models
Implement sandboxing, dry-run/preview modes, invariants, approvals, and rollback strategies so agents can safely change real infrastructure and applications
Take hierarchical planning / agent research prototypes and build production-grade agents, services and APIs around them (auth, rate limits, quotas, retries)
Anticipate production system needs (security, networking, SLOs/SLAs) and instrument for reliability and usage via observability (logs, traces, guardrails)
Guide architecture trade-offs and reason about IP boundaries as an engineering design dimension
Build, deploy, monitor, and operate LLMs in production on-premises in diverse customer environments and implement MLOps best practices (CI/CD pipelines, containerization, continuous monitoring) to ensure reliable performance
Lead through influence, setting engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, and on-call practices
Partner with founders to prioritize what to build next based on customer needs, market demand and technical implementation
Qualification
Required
10+ years of software engineering experience, including time operating at Staff/Principal scope or equivalent
Deep experience in designing and building AI systems, large-scale distributed systems, infra/devtools, SaaS platforms, or other safety-critical automation domains
Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, C++), plus comfort with Python for glue/ML/agent work
Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containers, CI/CD, and modern deployment practices (Kubernetes or equivalent)
Track record of building systems and shipping with reliability and safety in mind
Build a high-trust, inclusive, feedback-driven engineering culture that values autonomy, learning, and accountability
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence across technical and business stakeholders
Customer-centric: you like talking to users and grounding decisions in real workflows
Calm, pragmatic, and low-ego: you can operate with incomplete information and still make clear decisions
Enjoy oscillating between high-level architecture and low-level debugging when something breaks in production
Benefits
Comprehensive Health, Dental, and Vision coverage beginning on the first day for employees and their families, paid 100% by Sailplane
Equity grant participation
Flexible PTO with no accrual or set annual cap, plus 15 paid holidays per year
Health and Wellness stipend ($3,000 annually) to help support your personal health goals
AI tools stipend ($1,200 annually) to encourage hands-on familiarity with emerging tools
12 weeks of paid parental leave
Company
Sailplane
Sailplane is a technological company focused on Hierarchical Planning AI research.
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
unknown2023-10-01Seed
Company data provided by crunchbase