Principal AI Engineer
Chicago, IL, USA Hybrid
$97,000–$189,000 a yearJobFig found this opening at its original source and checks that it remains available.
About the role
You have a clear vision of where your career can go. And we have the leadership to help you get there. At CNA, we strive to create a culture in which people know they matter and are part of something important, ensuring the abilities of all employees are used to their fullest potential. Individual contributor providing the highest level of technical leadership in the design, development, and scaling of CNA's AI-native agentic engineering platform. This role operates at the intersection of AI systems engineering, developer experience, and software delivery — building the foundational platform capabilities that enable the broad engineering organization to build, ship, and run high-quality, secure AI-native systems at the speed of AI. The focus is on designing and delivering agentic workflows, AI-augmented CI/CD pipelines, reusable skills and agent frameworks, and quality/security guardrails that make AI-accelerated delivery safe and scalable across the enterprise.
What you'll bring
- Demonstrated ability to design developer platforms and tooling that serve hundreds of engineers at varying skill levels — balancing power-user capability with guardrails that prevent misuse and maintain code quality at scale.
- Proven ability to evaluate and integrate emerging AI technologies rapidly, with the judgment to distinguish between hype and production-ready capability.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-moving domain where the tooling landscape changes weekly.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex AI engineering concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Able to influence engineering culture and drive adoption of new practices across a large, diverse organization including internal teams and managed service providers.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with an outcomes-oriented mindset — focused on measurable improvements in delivery speed, code quality, and engineering productivity rather than tooling adoption metrics.
- Bachelor's Degree
- Minimum of 9 years of solid, diverse work experience in software engineering with a minimum of 6 years in application development, including significant recent experience (2+ years) building or operating AI-augmented development tools, agentic systems, or developer platforms.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience with LLM-based engineering tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) in production engineering workflows, not just experimental use.
- I n certain jurisdictions, CNA is legally required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role.
- Salary determinations are based on various factors, including but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and location.
- CNA offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to help our employees – and their family members – achieve their physical, financial, emotional and social wellbeing goals.