Principal Engineer, Commercial AI Forward Deployment

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** This is not a remote position. T-Mobile is a hybrid work environment requiring work in the office three (3) days per week. The successful candidate will be located in either Seattle, Washington or Frisco, Texas areas.**
Job Overview
The Principal Engineer, Commercial AI Forward Deployment is the senior technical engineer on T-Mobile's most complex commercial AI engagements and often the first technical point of contact a strategic customer works with. The role supports T-Mobile's commercial AI programs. Responsibilities include supporting Kinetic Edge AI (KEAI) and the broader Physical AI program, but are not limited to them, and will extend to AI applications T-Mobile sells to business customers. This person embeds with customer teams to turn ambiguous, often unprecedented use cases in areas such as smart city and public safety, utilities, industrial automation, and autonomous mobility into working systems on T-Mobile's network, edge compute, and cloud. They are equally comfortable writing an inference pipeline for a robotics workload, explaining network slicing to a customer executive, and telling a business team when a timeline does not fit the physics of RF propagation or the GPU capacity available. This is a build-and-lead role, not an advisory one. The Principal Engineer writes and ships production code on the hardest problems, owns technical direction for the sensor and vision data-at-scale layer (ingestion, fusion, fine-tuning, training) on their engagements, and sets the engineering standards other FDEs follow. They decide with AI Engineering which field-built components are ready to graduate into the platform. Success is measured by working deployments on the most complex engagements, production stability, and the amount of field work that becomes reusable platform capability.

Job Responsibilities:

• Serve as the lead technical engineer on the most complex customer engagements, setting the technical approach where no industry playbook exists. 

• Write and ship production code on the highest-risk parts of each engagement, such as multi-sensor fusion, real-time edge inference, device and network integration, and performance tuning. 

• Own technical direction for the sensor and vision data-at-scale layer on assigned engagements, including ingestion, fusion, fine-tuning, and training, built to platform standards from day one so productization is a graduation, not a rewrite. 

• Make build decisions that span workstreams and teams, partnering with the Principal Architect on solution design and with Network RAN and Core engineering on connectivity and edge compute. 

• Keep customer and internal business commitments grounded in what the network, edge infrastructure, and current AI capabilities can deliver, and explain tradeoffs in plain language executives can act on. 

• Define production-readiness criteria, evaluation methods, and operational standards for field deployments, and lead root cause analysis and post-mortems for major incidents. 

• Decide with AI Engineering and product owners which field-built components graduate into the platform, and bring the product roadmap evidence drawn from multiple deployments. 

• Provide technical leadership without formal authority: direct the technical work of Sr Engineers and Engineers, review critical code, and raise the hiring bar for the FDE team. 

• Also responsible for other duties/projects as assigned by business management as needed. 

Required Education:

• Bachelor's Degree and 7 years of related work experience OR a combination of education and experience deemed equivalent. Acceptable areas of study include Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, Telecom Engineering, Robotics, or a related field; Master's degree a plus 

Preferred Work Experience:

• 7-10 years of professional software or systems engineering, including customer-facing, solutions, or forward-deployed engineering work 

• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production or pilot systems involving IoT devices, cameras, sensors, robotics, drones, or autonomous systems 

• Experience with data science, ML, or big data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, or equivalent), including model fine-tuning and evaluation 

• Working knowledge of cellular network fundamentals such as RAN architecture, network slicing, private networks, and SIM/eSIM provisioning 

• Experience leading technical work across multiple engineers or teams on ambiguous, customer-facing programs 

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Production Software Development and Code Review 

• Data and ML Pipeline Engineering (ingestion, fusion, fine-tuning, training, inference) 

• Edge and Real-time Inference Systems 

• Containerized and Edge Deployment (Kubernetes / OpenShift) 

• Customer and Executive Technical Communication 

• Technical Leadership Without Formal Authority 

Preferred Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Cellular Network and Connectivity: 5G, network slicing, edge/MEC, SIM/eSIM 

• Robotics, Autonomy, or Computer Vision Frameworks such as ROS 2, NVIDIA Isaac, or DeepStream 

• Agentic AI, Multi-agent Orchestration, and AI System Governance 

• Edge and Orchestration Platforms such as AWS Outposts, Vantiq, or Spectro Cloud

Preferred Licenses and Certification:

• Cloud architecture or ML certification (AWS / Azure / GCP) 

• Kubernetes certification (CKA / CKAD)
  

#LI-Corporate

• At least 18 years of age
• Legally authorized to work in the United States

Travel:
Travel Required (Yes/No): Yes
DOT Regulated:
DOT Regulated Position (Yes/No): No
Safety Sensitive Position (Yes/No): No

Total Target Cash Earnings Opportunity: $197,400 - $356,040

National Base Pay Range: $164,500 - $296,700

The Total Target Cash Earnings Opportunity represents the expected total cash compensation for this role at target performance, combining base salary and annual incentive opportunity. Actual earnings may be higher or lower depending on individual performance and overall company results. 

The base pay range reflects the compensation component of this opportunity. The candidate’s actual pay will be based on various factors, such as work location, qualifications, and experience, so the actual starting pay will vary within this range. To find the pay range for this role based on hiring location, https://paylookup.t-mobile.com/paylookup?reqID=REQ373526¶dox=1

At T-Mobile, employees in regular, non-temporary roles are eligible for an annual bonus or periodic sales incentive or bonus, based on their role. Corporate employees are eligible for a year-end bonus based on individual and/or company performance and which is set at a percentage of the employee’s eligible earnings in the prior year. Certain positions in Customer Care are eligible for monthly bonuses based on individual and/or team performance. The incentive component included in the Total Target Cash Earnings Opportunity reflects target performance. Actual earnings included in the Total Target Cash Earnings Opportunity reflect target performance; actual payouts may vary. 
At T-Mobile, our benefits exemplify the spirit of One Team, Together! A big part of how we care for one another is working to ensure our benefits evolve to meet the needs of our team members. Full and part-time employees have access to the same benefits when eligible. We cover all of the bases, offering medical, dental and vision insurance, a flexible spending account, 401(k), employee stock grants, employee stock purchase plan, paid time off and up to 12 paid holidays - which total about 4 weeks for new full-time employees and about 2.5 weeks for new part-time employees annually - paid parental and family leave, family building benefits, back-up care, enhanced family support, childcare subsidy, tuition assistance, college coaching, short- and long-term disability, voluntary AD&D coverage, voluntary accident coverage, voluntary life insurance, voluntary disability insurance, and voluntary long-term care insurance. We don't stop there - eligible employees can also receive mobile service & home internet discounts, pet insurance, and access to commuter and transit programs! To learn about T-Mobile’s amazing benefits, check out www.t-mobilebenefits.com.

Never stop growing! As part of the T-Mobile team, you know the Un-carrier doesn’t have a corporate ladder–it’s more like a jungle gym of possibilities! We love helping our employees grow in their careers, because it’s that shared drive to aim high that drives our business and our culture forward. By applying for this career opportunity, you’re living our values while investing in your career growth–and we applaud it. You’re unstoppable! T-Mobile USA, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All decisions concerning the employment relationship will be made without regard to age, race, ethnicity, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status, citizenship status, veteran status, the presence of any physical or mental disability, or any other status or characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. Discrimination, retaliation or harassment based upon any of these factors is wholly inconsistent with how we do business and will not be tolerated. Talent comes in all forms at the Un-carrier. If you are an individual with a disability and need reasonable accommodation at any point in the application or interview process, please let us know by emailing [email protected] or calling 1-844-873-9500. Please note, this contact channel is not a means to apply for or inquire about a position and we are unable to respond to non-accommodation related requests.