Principal AI Engineer

For over 20 years, Smartsheet has helped people and teams achieve–well, anything. As the Intelligent Work Management Platform, we are redefining the velocity of work by uniting people, data, and AI to move businesses forward. We don’t just automate tasks; we eliminate execution silos and turn strategic vision into measurable enterprise impact. We’re creating a space to think big and take action, because when challenge meets purpose and AI-powered execution meets human ingenuity, that’s magic at work. It’s what we show up for every day, helping organizations not just keep up with change, but thrive because of it.

Our India Global Capability Center isn't just supporting global operations—we’re leading global innovation. After scaling rapidly into a best-in-class hub, we deliver the product innovation and enterprise capabilities that accelerate our global growth, profitability, and scale. As we expand Smartsheet India, we’re searching for a Principal AI Engineer, who craves variety and ownership. You’ll have the opportunity to work across multiple teams and disciplines, building a versatile skillset while solving the complex challenges of a global platform. 

You Will:

• Own the target-state architecture for Smartsheet's AI platform, defining the standards that bind Data, Agents, Knowledge Graph, Context Graph into one coherent system.
• Set the architecture for the agent harness and sub-agent framework including orchestration, lifecycle, hand-off contracts, Evals (Offline and Online) and capability-tier classification used across all agent teams.
• Design and own schema/ontology, ingestion and freshness pipelines, and the retrieval and grounding patterns that keep agent responses reliable.
• Build and maintain a reference agent framework that teams fork or extend, so no team re-solves orchestration, tracing, or deployment from scratch.
• Author and publish a shared skills and tools library with clear interface contracts and a versioning model any team can build on.
• Stand up fast, slim prototypes to de-risk architecture decisions (new sub-agent patterns, retrieval strategies, partner capabilities) before teams commit a roadmap to them, and own the criteria for promoting a prototype into a supported, shared capability.
• Define deployment, security, and governance patterns, including the standard path from prototype to production and the AI governance plane applied across platforms and agents.
• Serve as Smartsheet's primary technical lead for strategic technology partners — Databricks (Lakehouse, Unity Catalog, Unity AI Gateway), AWS (Bedrock, AgentCore), Anthropic (Claude, MCP, agent patterns),and others — running standing technical syncs and routing early-access programs through prototypes evaluated against real Smartsheet problems.
• Partner closely with Principal Engineers and team leads across Smartsheet, aligning to platform milestones through architecture authority in design and demonstrated prototypes.
• Engage with Forward Deployed Engineering (equipping the field team with reference frameworks and skills) and MCP/external parity (reviewing gate criteria before external commitments).
• Drive architecture decisions to close quickly and keep the escalation backlog near zero.

You Have:

• Deep, hands-on experience architecting production agentic systems on Databricks Platform, AWS Bedrock/AgentCore and MCPs
• Experience in Agent harness/orchestration design, sub-agent boundaries, tracing and observability (e.g., MLflow), Evals, Governance, Responsible AI and cost/latency instrumentation at platform scale.
• Strong background in Knowledge and Context graph based systems, including ontology design, ingestion pipelines, and retrieval/grounding evaluation.
• A builder's track record: you prototype rapidly, ship working software, and let adoption — not mandate — prove which patterns are right.
• Experience designing reusable, versioned software interfaces (skills, tools, libraries) that multiple teams adopt directly, with clear contracts and promotion criteria from prototype to production.
• Familiarity with modern LLM/agent tooling and standards, including Databricks, Bedrock, Strands SDK, and MCP (Model Context Protocol).
• Comfort operating as a technical DRI in strategic partner relationships (e.g., Databricks, AWS, Anthropic), translating partner roadmaps and early-access capabilities into platform decisions.
• Proven ability to set cross-team technical standards and drive alignment without formal management authority — influencing through design quality, working prototypes, and clear documentation rather than positional control.
• Strong judgment on architectural tradeoffs spanning model selection, inference patterns, deployment, and governance, balanced with respect for team-level autonomy over delivery.
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills and translating ambiguity into documented, decisive architecture calls.
• Legally eligible to work in India on an ongoing basis