Principal Software Engineering Manager - AI Engineering (Position located in Bengaluru, India)

As a Principal Software Engineering Manager, you'll lead a full-stack AI engineering team of data scientists, ML engineers, software engineers, and data engineers - building the data pipelines, models, services, and endpoints that power our products end-to-end. You'll set the technical direction across the stack, turn applied research into production systems, and grow the people doing the work.

Responsibilities

Lead from the front: Stay close to the AI engineering craft while multiplying your team’s real-world product impact; Drive AI delivery: Build, orchestrate, and deploy production-ready LLM, SLM, and agentic architectures (RAG, fine-tuning, eval pipelines, context engineering); Own the stack: Take full ownership from data ingestion pipelines to consumer-facing APIs; Translate strategy into execution: Turn KnowBe4's goals into operational plans and clear priorities for the team; Coordinate cross-functionally: Partner across product, research, and engineering functions to deliver end-to-end; Coach and grow the squad: Build, mentor, and develop a full stack AI team; own hiring, performance, and career growth

Requirements

B.E/B.Tech/M.Tech/MS with 10+ years across AI/Software/Data Engineering or ML, including 2+ years directly leading engineers while staying hands-on; Proven track record deploying foundation models, RAG, fine-tuning, agentic systems (MCP, LLM orchestration) into production; Strong full-stack chops — Python, FastAPI/APIs, distributed computing, serverless, and AWS (Bedrock/SageMaker); Comfortable leading across data pipelines (Glue/Spark), model serving, MLOps, and vector search/RAG; Proven success hiring and mentoring strong IC talent across multiple disciplines; Strong foundation in software engineering and background in product development

Nice to have

ML/DS depth - statistical modeling, NLP, Hugging Face, ensembles - and exposure to cybersecurity, fraud, or adversarial domains

Benefits

Company-wide bonuses based on monthly sales targets; employee referral bonuses; adoption assistance; tuition reimbursement; certification reimbursement; certification completion bonuses; modern, high-tech, and fun work environment