[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Publicis Groupe Holdings B.V

Role Description

Principal Engineer, AI/ML & Cloud, to serve as the top individual-contributor technical authority for our customer-facing AI capabilities and the cloud platform that powers them. This is a strategy-and-architecture role: you will define the reference architecture for Generative and Agentic AI on the platform, establish the engineering standards other teams build against, and personally deliver the hardest, highest-leverage pieces of the system. You will operate as a force multiplier across the AI/data science and platform engineering teams — shaping direction through architecture, design reviews, and hands-on mentorship rather than through people management.

The position’s purpose includes, but is not limited to:

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for the AI platform — from data foundations through model serving, retrieval, and agent orchestration — and drive it from vision to production.
• Define reference architectures, engineering standards, and paved-path patterns that AI and platform teams build against.
• Make and document the high-stakes build/buy, model-selection, and platform decisions (frameworks, vector stores, inference strategy, cloud services), informing senior leadership of alternatives and trade-offs.
• Lead the analysis and design of net-new and enhanced AI capabilities for the marketing platform as per business strategy and requirements.
• Set the standard for the development environment, tooling, and AI-assisted engineering workflow across teams.
• Partner with QA, product, data science and production support to bring new or enhanced AI features to market and resolve the most complex issues.
• Establish monitoring, evaluation, cost-governance and reliability practices for production AI systems.
• Guide and de-risk platform, security, and version/patch upgrade strategy for the AI and cloud estate.

Qualifications

• 13+ years of experience across ML engineering, data engineering, and large-scale distributed systems, including deep architecture experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and shipping Generative/Agentic AI systems in production.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a Principal-level individual contributor — setting technical direction, owning architecture, and influencing multiple teams without direct people-management authority.
• Track record of being the technical decision-maker on high-stakes platform and AI initiatives.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI applications using LLMs at scale.
• Deep experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval systems in production.
• Experience designing agentic AI systems — tool-using agents, orchestration, and multi-step reasoning workflows.
• Expertise in optimizing LLM usage across a platform.
• Ability to establish LLMOps/MLOps practice.
• Strong data engineering skills: pipeline design, data transformation, and working with large-scale datasets.
• Depth with distributed data processing and workflow orchestration.
• Ability to design and deploy RAG systems, embeddings pipelines, and LLM-powered features.
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying production-grade solutions on AWS.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, containers and orchestration.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Proficiency in Python and in Linux/Shell/bash scripting.
• Strong understanding of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions.
• Ability to work independently and set direction while integrating with a team.
• Proven analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Experience mentoring and technically guiding senior engineers.
• Excellent experience working with geographically and culturally diverse teams.
• Ability to write detailed technical specifications for developers.
• Deep familiarity with the full Application Development Life Cycle.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent; advanced degree preferred.

Requirements

• Prior experience in automotive marketing and/or CRM applications strongly preferred.
• Experience with ETL tooling.
• Proven ability to define solution architecture and set direction across teams.
• Awareness of Dimensional, Fact, and Data modelling.
• Familiarity with complex data lake environments.
• Excellence in impact analysis and root cause analysis.
• Ability to design and build flexible, extensible systems.
• Awareness of responsible-AI, data privacy, and model-governance considerations.
• Strong communication skills (verbal and written).

Benefits

• Monetary assistance and support for Adoption, Surrogacy and Fertility.
• Monetary assistance and support for pet adoption.
• Employee Assistance Programs and Health/Wellness/Comfort reimbursements.
• Tuition Assistance.
• Paid time off that includes Flexible Time off Vacation, Annual Sick Days, Volunteer Days, Holiday and Identity days.
• Matching Gifts programs.
• Flexible working arrangements.
• 'Work Your World' Program encouraging employees to work from anywhere.
• Business Resource Groups that support multiple affinities and alliances.