Principal AI Engineer at Workato

About Workato Workato transforms technology complexity into business opportunity. As the leader in enterprise orchestration, Workato helps businesses globally streamline operations by connecting data, processes, applications, and experiences. Its AI-powered platform enables teams to navigate complex workflows in real-time, driving efficiency and agility. Trusted by a community of 400,000 global customers, Workato empowers organizations of every size to unlock new value and lead in today’s fast-changing world. Learn how Workato helps businesses of all sizes achieve more at workato.com. Why join us? Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company. But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives. If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you! Also, feel free to check out why: • Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on” • Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world • Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America • Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers Responsibilities We are looking for a highly accomplished Principal Software Engineer (AI / Machine Learning) to join our growing team. In this role, you will define the technical vision and architecture for our AI and Machine Learning products, driving strategy across teams and mentoring engineers to deliver exceptional user experiences. The ideal candidate will combine deep technical expertise with strong leadership skills and a proven track record of building and scaling ML systems in production. As part of this role you will • Architect and drive the technical vision for conversational AI interfaces that handle multi-turn customer interactions, maintain context across sessions, and seamlessly escalate to human agents when necessary. • Define the architectural roadmap for advanced AI/ML systems with a focus on LLMs, AI Agents, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, setting technical standards and best practices across the organization. • Design and oversee production-grade AI pipelines for data processing, model training, fine-tuning, and serving at scale, establishing reliability and performance benchmarks. • Establish feedback loops and continuous learning frameworks that incorporate customer satisfaction metrics, agent corrections, and conversation outcomes to systematically improve model performance over time. • Drive the strategy for analytics dashboards and reporting tools to track automation effectiveness, identify common customer pain points, and measure key performance indicators like resolution time, containment rate, and customer satisfaction scores. • Own and drive cross-team technical initiatives for AI system integration into existing products and services, aligning engineering efforts with business strategy. • Mentor and guide data scientists, ML researchers, and senior engineers to productionize new AI approaches and models, raising the technical bar across the team. • Represent Workato’s AI capabilities externally through conference presentations, technical blog posts, and engagement with the broader AI/ML community. • Influence engineering culture and technical decision-making across the organization, championing engineering excellence, code quality, and scalable design patterns. Requirements Qualifications / Experience / Technical Skills • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Master’s or Ph.D. preferred. • 12+ years in backend software development using modern programming languages (e.g., Python (strongly preferred!), Golang or Java), with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or staff-level role. • Proven track record of architecting and shipping production conversational AI systems at scale, including chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated support agents using LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models). • Expertise in natural language understanding (NLU) and intent classification for customer query interpretation, entity extraction, and conversation flow management. • Experience with Automated QA systems for Customer Support. • Experience implementing multi-channel support automation across chat, email, voice, and messaging platforms with consistent context handling. • Strong background in customer support metrics and KPIs including CSAT, first contact resolution, average handle time, and containment rate optimization. • Experience with sentiment analysis and emotion detection for escalation triggers and customer satisfaction monitoring. • Expertise in building knowledge bases and FAQ systems with dynamic content retrieval and self-learning capabilities from support interactions. • Proficiency with contact center platforms (Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Genesys, or similar) and their API integrations. • Experience implementing real-time agent assist systems that provide suggestions, knowledge articles, and response templates during live interactions. • Deep expertise in compliance and security requirements for handling sensitive customer data in automated systems (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR), with experience defining organizational security standards for AI systems. • Experience with A/B testing and experimentation frameworks for optimizing conversation flows and response strategies. Soft Skills / Personal Characteristics • Exceptional communication skills with the ability to present technical strategy to executive leadership and influence cross-organizational decisions • Proven ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders • Detail-oriented with strong focus on quality • Self-directed with a track record of identifying high-impact opportunities and driving them to completion autonomously • Passion for mentoring engineers, growing teams, and solving complex technical challenges at scale (REQ ID: 2666)