Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture - 11310

Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry-leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. We empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.Why join Coupa?🔹 Pioneering Technology: At Coupa, we're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging the latest technology to empower our customers with greater efficiency and visibility in their spend.🔹 Collaborative Culture: We value collaboration and teamwork, and our culture is driven by transparency, openness, and a shared commitment to excellence.🔹 Global Impact: Join a company where your work has a global, measurable impact on our clients, the business, and each other.Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.The Impact of a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture at Coupa:Coupa's AI platform powers production agents, conversational AI (Navi), customer-built agents (Agent Studio), and a suite of ML models for classification, fraud detection, and supplier intelligence. The Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture will define the technical direction for the next generation of these capabilities, designing how we train, evaluate, and serve models that are deeply tuned to enterprise spend management. Reporting to the Sr. Director, you will be hands-on in architecture and prototyping while guiding a growing team of ML and data engineers.What You'll Do: Define the architecture for model training, evaluation, and serving across Coupa's AI platformEvaluate and select model approaches (open-weight, commercial, and hybrid) against enterprise accuracy and cost requirementsDesign evaluation frameworks that measure model quality on Coupa's specific task categoriesDrive technical partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providersArchitect training data pipelines, including synthetic data generation and quality validationDesign retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that extend our existing RAG infrastructure with structured knowledge retrievalEstablish technical standards for model safety, tenant data isolation, and responsible AIWrite code, review PRs, and prototype approaches, especially in the early phasesMentor and guide ML and data engineers across US and IndiaCollaborate with product, existing AI platform, and cloud operations teamsWhat You Will Bring to Coupa: 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on ML/AI systemsDemonstrated experience training or fine-tuning large language models. Must have shipped a fine-tuned or domain-adapted model to productionDeep knowledge of transformer architectures, training optimization (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, RLHF, DPO), and inference servingExperience with distributed training on GPU clustersStrong understanding of RAG architectures, vector search, embedding models, and knowledge graph integrationHands-on experience with cloud AI/ML services (model hosting, managed training, or equivalent)Experience designing and running custom evaluation suites for LLMsProficiency in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure toolingAdvanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experienceExperience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms preferredThe estimated pay range for this role is $241,000 - $313,200The starting salary for the successful candidate will be based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa’s Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.