Principal Engineer – Supply Chain AI
Smith Arnold Partners
For a Principal AI Engineer, Staff AI Engineer, Senior Generative AI Engineer or hands-on AI Architect who enjoys building production systems and wants to see their work used across a large global organization, this is an opportunity worth exploring.
The company is investing heavily in its broader digital transformation, and AI is an important part of that strategy. This is a high-visibility position with significant opportunity to take on additional responsibility and advance as the AI organization continues to grow.
You’ll have the ability to build rather than simply maintain, work on AI initiatives that have direct business impact, and have visibility across technology and business leadership.
This is an established, highly successful company with the resources and stability of a global industry leader, but the AI environment itself is still evolving rapidly.
What People are saying about this company:
– “Great place to work! Work culture is fantastic! Top notch leadership team, Innovative and cutting-edge environment ”
– “Benefits are excellent”
– “Your growth is in your hands”
Title: Principal AI Engineer – Generative AI / Supply Chain
Location: Detroit, MI – Hybrid
Salary: $145,000 -184,000 + Bonus
We are working with an award-winning global manufacturing and technology company that is making a significant investment in AI as part of a major digital transformation.
They are looking for a Principal AI Engineer to design and build production Generative AI solutions across a large, complex global supply chain organization.
This is a hands-on engineering position for someone who has already built and deployed AI applications and wants the opportunity to work on meaningful enterprise use cases at scale. You’ll have considerable ownership over solutions from initial problem definition and architecture through development, deployment and ongoing improvement.
The focus is practical: Where can AI save significant time, improve decisions, reduce risk and automate complex work?
What you’ll be working on
You’ll build AI applications and copilots across areas such as procurement, supplier management, planning, quality, risk, materials management, engineering and supply chain operations.
The technical work will include Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, LLM orchestration, vector search, intelligent automation, conversational analytics and enterprise knowledge search.
You’ll design RAG pipelines across complex enterprise data, develop agentic workflows using technologies such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP and A2A, and build secure integrations that allow AI agents to retrieve information and interact with enterprise systems.
This role also goes well beyond prototyping. You’ll be responsible for building AI applications that can operate reliably in production, including evaluation, observability, security, guardrails, model routing, latency, performance and cost optimization.
What they’re looking for
The ideal candidate has 8+ years of software engineering experience and has moved deeply into Generative AI and LLM-based application development while remaining a strong hands-on engineer.
You should be very comfortable with Python, APIs, distributed systems, LLMs, RAG, vector databases and modern AI frameworks, along with cloud and production engineering technologies such as AWS/Azure/GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD.
Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Llama, Mistral, Pinecone, FAISS, Weaviate, LangChain or LlamaIndex would be highly relevant.
They are particularly interested in engineers who understand how to connect AI with real enterprise systems and data—not simply build standalone AI applications.
Experience with SAP/S4, SAP Ariba, SAP IBP, Ivalua or other ERP and supply chain platforms would be a strong advantage. Supply chain experience across procurement, supplier management, planning, quality, risk, manufacturing or logistics would also be valuable.
Application
Your Recruiter
Matt Arnold
EVP, Managing Partners, Head of Technology Recruiting