Senior Principal Engineer – AI Search & Retrieval

Position Overview
At Autodesk, we celebrate all the real-world problem solvers, creative rebels, and innovators who are driven to improve the reality around us. Because we don’t believe in waiting for progress; we believe in making it.
We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer for AI-powered Search Infrastructure within Autodesk Platform Services. In this role, you will help define and build the next generation of Autodesk's Search Platform, powering search experiences across Autodesk’s Industry Clouds – Fusion, Forma and Flow.
You will provide technical leadership for evolving our search platform beyond traditional information retrieval toward AI-powered search and retrieval systems. This includes query understanding and orchestration, semantic and hybrid retrieval, ranking and reranking, and the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning models to improve search relevance and user experience.
The role requires a combination of deep distributed-systems expertise, strong foundations in information retrieval, and practical experience designing and operating modern AI/ML-powered systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the software architecture and system design of highly scalable, distributed, data-intensive search and AI services.

• Define the technical architecture for AI-powered search, including query understanding and orchestration, retrieval, ranking/reranking, and integration of LLMs and ML models into search pipelines.

• Drive the evolution of search architectures combining lexical, semantic, vector and hybrid retrieval approaches.

• Partner closely with product teams, ML/AI engineers, and leadership to define the strategic technical roadmap and translate it into production systems.

• Establish architectural patterns for deploying and operating LLMs and ML models within latency-sensitive, high-scale search infrastructure.

• Define approaches for evaluating search and AI quality, including relevance, retrieval and ranking effectiveness, latency, reliability and cost.

• Demonstrate high levels of ownership and accountability and work closely with engineering teams to deliver consistently.

• Align technical direction with business needs, balancing near-term opportunities with the long-term architecture of the platform.

• Champion engineering, AI/ML and operational best practices across the team and broader organization.

• Hire and mentor senior engineers and help build high-performing engineering teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical work experience.

• 15+ years of experience designing complex software systems, with significant hands-on engineering experience in languages such as Java and cloud platforms such as AWS.

• 5+ years of experience in a technical leadership role within a large and distributed organization, designing systems operating at significant scale.

• Strong experience with Information Retrieval and search systems, including technologies such as Lucene, Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

• Experience designing or building AI/ML-powered search, recommendation, retrieval or ranking systems.

• Strong understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their application to search, including query understanding, query rewriting/expansion, retrieval augmentation, ranking/reranking or related search use cases.

• Understanding of modern ranking and reranking approaches, including ML-based ranking, neural rerankers and/or LLM-based reranking.

• Experience with embeddings, vector search/vector databases and semantic or hybrid retrieval architectures.

• Understanding of the lifecycle of ML/LLM-powered production systems, including model integration, inference, evaluation, observability, latency and cost considerations.

• Expertise in cloud infrastructure platforms such as AWS.

• Thorough understanding of distributed systems, including scalability, performance, reliability, security and consistency characteristics.

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS architectures, with a deep appreciation for platform and API-first design.

• Expertise with modern technology stacks, API design, microservices, stream processing, resilience and operational excellence.

• Experience monitoring and improving the reliability of complex systems at scale.

• Exposure to managing security and compliance challenges in cloud products and/or platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building query orchestration or query intelligence systems that use multiple retrieval strategies, models or data sources.

• Experience with learning-to-rank, neural ranking, cross-encoders, rerankers or LLM-based relevance models.

• Experience designing RAG or retrieval-augmented AI architectures, particularly where retrieval quality and grounding are critical.

• Experience with search relevance evaluation, including offline evaluation, human relevance judgments, experimentation/A/B testing and production quality metrics.

• Understanding of the trade-offs between lexical retrieval, embedding-based retrieval, neural reranking and LLM-based approaches.

• Experience optimizing AI/search architectures for latency, quality, throughput and inference cost at production scale.

• Familiarity with modern ML infrastructure and model serving architectures.

Learn More

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

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When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

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