AI - Principal Software Engineer - United States
$175,000 - $225,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 6 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role is for an AI-Engineering Principal Software Engineer responsible for building the AI engineering platform for semiconductor test from the ground up.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and ship agent tooling, RAG systems, or infrastructure work.
- Set technical direction for software integration, cloud infrastructure, and on-prem hardware selection/deployment for air-gapped LLM inference.
- Architect and drive team-wide adoption of reusable patterns for custom AI agent development, RAG/retrieval architecture, and custom UIs.
- Be responsible for the Kubernetes-based infrastructure, including capacity planning, resource budgeting, scaling, and production incident response.
- Provide guidance, coaching, and day-to-day prioritization for the team and serve as a technical escalation point.
What you'll need
- Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or equivalent.
- 5+ years relevant experience.
- Senior-level ability to design, build, and ship production software independently.
- In-depth experience architecting distributed systems in Kubernetes/cloud environments, including production ownership.
- Working fluency with LLM/agent tooling: agent frameworks, MCP or equivalent tool-integration patterns, RAG components.
- Hands-on experience selecting, installing, and optimizing GPU/server hardware and inference stacks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM), ideally including air-gapped/on-prem environments.
Nice to have
- Prior technical-lead or architect experience.
- Frontend/UI skills sufficient to ship a real agent-facing application.
- C++ and Python knowledge and prior production experience in either.
- Semiconductor industry familiarity, particularly test/ATE domain.
Skills: agent tooling, RAG systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, LLM inference, GPU/server hardware
This role has been open 4 days — well below the 53-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
923
|
Median days open
53 d
|
Median salary
$229k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Cohu | All employers we track in this specialty (923 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 923 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 12 | 6025 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 4 d | 53 d (−49 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $229k |
Skills observed across this category: agent tooling, RAG systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, LLM inference, GPU/server hardware
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 255 open roles · median 48 d
- Qualcomm · 60 open roles · median 60 d
- AMD · 51 open roles · median 30 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 86 d
- Cerebras · 39 open roles · median 76 d
- Intel Corporation · 36 open roles · median 15 d
How we counted: 923 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 11 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.