Principal Engineer, Apps Engineering (AI2539) - San Jose, California, United States
$120,800 - $193,300 USD yearly
Originally posted 9 September 2026 by the employer.
Architect and develop applications for the SiMa Modalix platform.
About the role
As a Principal Engineer, Applications Engineering, you will lead strategic customer engagements building robotics, autonomous systems, industrial automation, drones, computer vision, and edge AI solutions. This role requires end-to-end ownership of complex customer programs, from technical discovery to production deployment on the SiMa Modalix platform.
What you'll do
- Serve as the technical lead and primary interface for strategic customers deploying applications on the SiMa Modalix platform.
- Own customer engagements end-to-end, including requirements, solution architecture, project planning, milestones, technical execution, and production deployment.
- Independently lead customer technical discussions, architecture reviews, issue resolution, and project status reviews.
- Architect and develop AI and edge applications for robotics, autonomous systems, industrial automation, and computer vision use cases.
- Optimize AI application performance, including latency, throughput, power, and memory utilization.
- Lead troubleshooting of complex hardware/software integration issues and drive cross-functional teams toward resolution.
What you'll need
- 10+ years of industry experience in Applications Engineering, Field Applications Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Systems Engineering.
- Demonstrated ability to independently lead complex technical customer engagements from requirements through deployment or production.
- Strong project planning and execution skills, including milestone planning, dependency management, and risk management.
- Software development experience in Python and C++.
- Deep experience with AI, computer vision, robotics, autonomous systems, or embedded applications.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, ONNX Runtime, and OpenCV.
- Experience with embedded Linux, heterogeneous compute platforms, SoCs, or AI accelerators.
- Strong understanding of AI inference, model deployment, performance optimization, and edge AI workflows.
- Proven ability to troubleshoot complex system-level hardware and software problems.
Nice to have
- Experience with semiconductor, AI accelerator, embedded computing, robotics, or edge AI platforms.
- Experience with multimodal AI, vision-language models, LLMs, or agentic AI applications.
- Background in computer vision, autonomous navigation, perception systems, robotics, drones, or industrial automation.
Skills: customer engagements, AI, embedded systems, robotics, computer vision, edge AI
This role has been open 34 days — well below the 44-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
99
|
Median days open
44 d
|
Median salary
$261k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | SiMa.ai | All employers we track in this specialty (99 roles · 19 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 99 |
| Median days open | 34 d | 44 d (−10 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $261k |
Skills observed across this category: customer engagements, AI, embedded systems, robotics, computer vision, edge AI
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 58 open roles · median 44 d
- AMD · 11 open roles · median 57 d
- Tenstorrent · 8 open roles · median 69 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 4 open roles · median 36 d
- Qualcomm · 3 open roles · median 83 d
- Microchip Technology · 2 open roles · median 27 d
How we counted: 99 open Applications FAE (AI ML Hardware) roles from 19 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 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. Figures refresh nightly.