Principal Engineer (Backend + AI)

Who We Are

Ontic provides software that helps corporate and government security teams identify threats, assess risk, and respond faster to keep people and organizations safe. Its Connected Intelligence Platform unifies security operations and data into a centralized system of record, enabling organizations to conduct risk assessments, protect against workplace violence, and manage threats and incidents more efficiently. Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies rely on Ontic to support security programs such as executive protection, threat intelligence, and corporate investigations.

Learn more at ontic.co or follow us on LinkedIn.

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Software Engineer - Backend + AI. This role involves designing, developing, and maintaining scalable backend systems for our product. You will also lead the integration of modern AI technologies to solve complex technical challenges and deliver powerful new features for our platform.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in backend technologies, a deep understanding of software architecture, and proven expertise in applying and integrating AI/ML services (like LLMs and vector search) into production environments. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a data science position.

What you will do

• Lead the architectural design and development of scalable backend systems that integrate modern AI/ML models and services.
• Collaborate on an agile team with Front-end and Back-end Engineers and Product Managers to build and release AI-powered features and enhancements.
• Evaluate and select third-party and open-source AI models (e.g., LLMs, embedding models) based on performance, scalability, and integration feasibility—not model creation.
• Design and maintain robust data pipelines and APIs to support AI functionalities, such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems.
• Find and address performance and security issues, with a specific focus on the unique challenges of AI-driven applications.
• Conduct code reviews, provide constructive feedback, and ensure code quality and performance optimization.
• Identify and address technical debt, ensuring the long-term maintainability and scalability of the backend systems.
• Identify and advocate for engineering best practices across the team, especially in the domain of applied AI.

What you should have

• 6+ years of experience and expert knowledge of service implementations in languages such as Java, Spring boot, Elasticsearch, MongoDB.
• Proven experience designing and integrating systems with AI/ML services, such as LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models) or vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus).
• Practical understanding of core AI application concepts like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings, and prompt engineering.
• Familiarity with AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) is a strong plus.
• Experience building the backend infrastructure (e.g., APIs, data pipelines) to support and serve fine-tuned models would be a significant advantage.
• At least 2 years of experience in a senior or lead role.
• Curiosity about how things work and love to share that knowledge with others.
• Strong Algorithmic & Problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently as well as manage the team and figuring out your way in the wild.
• Urge to learn new things & drive for focused milestones based high speed development.
• Experience in dealing with high scale data.
• Experience in managing product lifecycle from beginning to end.
• Familiarity and experience with JavaScript and modern front-end frameworks such as React.
• Interest in modern and RESTful API design principles.
• B. Tech / M. Tech degree in Computer Science.