Principal Engineer, AI​/ML

8116 - Midtown Office - 2220 W. Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23220

Car Max, the way your career should be!

At Car Max, a Principal Engineer, Artificial Intelligence is a technologist and thought leader with domain‑specific expertise in Generative AI. You should have extensive knowledge and experience with Machine Learning concepts, tools, and design patterns at enterprise scale. You should also be able to propose, architect, and implement AI based solutions as software services. You will play a critical role in capturing customer use cases, while shaping and executing a strategy to build an internal Generative AI framework for the adoption and the broad use across the enterprise.

• Suggest, collect, and translate requirements into an effective feature roadmap for organization platform capabilities
• Evaluate and recommend tradeoffs of features to the platform that allow use case owners to refine output generation and new technology offerings in the space
• Be a key partner in driving direction and goals for the team, both in terms of individual project impacts but also overall standards for Generative AI utilization in the organization
• Lead process and technology teams in developing integration, end‑to‑end, and UAT test strategy as well as testing activities
• Lead escalation of production performance and evaluation issues that require in-depth knowledge of techniques such as prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, and document embedding and retrieval
• Help drive the broader understanding of the use of Generative AI by interfacing with key roles in Operations, Legal, Security, and Technology
• Stay on top of industry trends and best practices to continuously improve what we do and ensure our customer experience is the best it can be
• Lead, mentor, and develop other engineers using technical expertise, best practices and industry standards for Generative AI systems

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Optional for sponsorship needs:
  Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field
• In depth experience using large language models (LLMs) with semantic search frameworks for chatbot implementations
• 7+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning/artificial intelligence, cloud computing, systems engineering
• In depth knowledge developing and debugging in Python, and experience with scripting languages such as shell scripts
• Experience communicating and working across functions to drive organization‑wide solutions
• Ability to positively influence team norms, culture, and technical vision

• Previous experience deploying large‑scale applications on Azure
• Experience developing, evaluating, and integrating continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of prompt engineering with feedback loops for Generative AI applications

• Experience developing generative AI applications using Azure OpenAI Service
• Experience with information retrieval services such as Azure AI search
• Leveraging development tools to design prototyping, prompt engineering, testing, and evaluation of LLM‑based applications (Prompt Flow)
• Experience in Dev Ops practices, testing frameworks, and CI/CD
• Experience developing AI orchestration layers (Semantic Kernel)
• Managing the security, versioning, and observability across APIs
• In depth knowledge developing and debugging in Python
• Experience with scripting languages such as shell scripts

This role will be based out of the Car Max Midtown office, Richmond VA or Car Max Technology Hub, Plano TX and have a Hybrid work arrangement.

• Associates based in Richmond work onsite 5 days per week.
• Associates based in Plano work onsite 2 days per week.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full‑time basis. Sponsorship will not be considered for this specific role.

Car Max disrupted the auto industry by delivering the honest, transparent and high‑integrity…