Senior Principal Software Engineer

Senior Principal Software Engineer (ML/AI Tooling)
Come be a part of Red Hat's charge to democratize AI with open source!

Red Hat's Global Engineering Team is looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to join our newly formed AI Engineering organization.## About the Team This role will be located within the AI Innovation team in Red Hat AI Engineering, which leads frontier AI research in Red Hat and drives innovation for Red Hat's AI Portfolio.

The AI Innovation Team conducts customer- and science-driven research and productizes outcomes via open-source software. Our focus is on bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and production by productizing research papers (often featured in top AI conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML) onto the Red Hat AI platform. We operate as an open organization where contributions are valued and expected from all levels.##

About the Role You will serve as a strategic technical leader bridging the gap between AI algorithms, open source AI/ML tooling, and the Red Hat AI platform. In this high-impact role, you will architect the frameworks that enable novel AI Algorithms in areas like synthetic data generation, model training, and inference-time scaling.

We are seeking a technical visionary with deep expertise in developing ML/AI tooling frameworks and a passion for open-source innovation. You will not only contribute code at an expert level but also define the technical strategy for the team, help to shape Red Hat’s open source AI/ML strategy, and help to "lift" the capabilities of our engineering organization. You will work across multiple teams to ensure that our research converts smoothly into successful, popular open-source projects and enterprise-ready products.

Furthermore, you will be the driving force to shape the team's practice to leverage AI tools in daily workflows, instilling a modern, efficient engineering mindset across the organization.## What You Will Do Strategic Architecture & Leadership
* Define the technical strategy and architecture for AI/ML tooling and frameworks to work smoothly with platform components, ensuring scalability, resilience, and maintainability.
* Serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the organization, advising leadership and stakeholders on the design of frameworks that drive community adoption and developer delight.
* Mentor and coach Principal and Senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and helping to build specialized AI/ML tooling skills within the team.
* Influence the broader open-source AI ecosystem by designing frameworks that make our tools popular in the community.
* Champion and define the team's best practices for leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, and documentation workflows.

Engineering & Execution
* Lead the development of complex projects on data generation, model training, inference-time scaling, and new algorithms.
* Set engineering standards for code reviews, testing frameworks (CI/CD), and system documentation.
* Evaluate and select appropriate technologies to build robust, user-friendly developer tools.
* Drive the design of our open-source tools to ensure they are accessible, extensible, and ready for widespread community adoption.## What You Will Bring
* 10+ years of software development experience, with significant experience architecting and building developer tooling for Machine Learning workflows.
* Ability to work in the Boston MA office
* Proven track record of maintaining or creating AI/ML projects, with a strong preference for popular Open Source projects or large-scale enterprise internal tooling frameworks.
* Deep knowledge of machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensor Flow) and the developer pain points associated with the ML lifecycle.
* Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in the context of tooling, fine-tuning, or serving.
* Demonstrated ability to identify and integrate the latest AI tooling frameworks and best practices into the organization to accelerate engineering efficiency.
* Proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust) with a strong preference for…