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Remote Principal Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a small team, remote environment * Passion for ... Programming and Data Processing * Python (Advanced, ideally including experience with parallel ...

Experience with data engineering workflows, feature stores, and scalable data pipelines ... Fully remote, work from home environment * Employee Share Option Plan * Flexible working hours

Principal Software Engineer (Python)

Irvine, CA ยท On-site +1

$144K - $194K/yr

The hybrid-remote Principal Software Development Engineer leads the design, development, and testing of complex software systems and applications. This senior-level position is responsible for ...

Showing results 21-40

Remote Principal Engineer information

See California salary details

$73K

$145.3K

$209.7K

How much do remote principal engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 4, 2026, the average yearly pay for remote principal engineer in California is $145,292.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $116,900.00 and $170,700.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a remote principal engineer?

A Remote Principal Engineer is a senior-level technical expert who leads complex engineering projects while working remotely. They provide architectural guidance, mentor teams, and ensure high-quality technical solutions. This role requires deep expertise in software development, systems design, and strategic decision-making. Principal Engineers collaborate with stakeholders, drive innovation, and help align technical goals with business objectives. Strong communication and leadership skills are essential for success in this position.

What does a remote principal engineer do?

As a Remote Principal Engineer, you will lead the architecture and development of major technical projects, set engineering standards, and make critical design decisions. Your day-to-day work may involve collaborating with cross-functional teams, reviewing code, mentoring other engineers, and ensuring system scalability and reliability. You'll often participate in high-level strategic discussions, address technical challenges, and help define the technology roadmap. The role is highly collaborative, requiring frequent virtual meetings and regular updates to stakeholders.

What skills and qualifications are needed to thrive as a remote principal engineer?

To thrive as a Remote Principal Engineer, you need advanced expertise in software architecture, coding, and systems design, typically backed by a relevant degree and extensive industry experience. Mastery of modern programming languages, cloud platforms (such as AWS, Azure, or GCP), and proficiency with DevOps tools and architectural frameworks are expected. Exceptional leadership, clear communication, and proactive problem-solving skills help you drive projects and mentor distributed engineering teams. These abilities ensure you can lead complex technical initiatives, foster innovation, and maintain high collaboration in a remote environment.

What are the most commonly searched types of Principal Engineer jobs in California?

The most popular types of Principal Engineer jobs in California are:

What are popular job titles related to Remote Principal Engineer jobs in California?

For Remote Principal Engineer jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Remote Principal Engineer jobs in California look for?

The top searched job categories for Remote Principal Engineer jobs in California are:

What cities in California are hiring for Remote Principal Engineer jobs?

Cities in California with the most Remote Principal Engineer job openings:

Infographic showing various Remote Principal Engineer job openings in California as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 91% Full Time, 6% Part Time, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 86% Physical, 5% Hybrid, and 9% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $145,292 per year, or $69.9 per hour.

Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Required, Work From Home

Ginas Tech Jobs

San Francisco, CA โ€ข Remote

Full-time

Medical, Dental, Vision, PTO

Re-posted 25 days ago


Job description

Job Description

Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Required, Work From Home

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you are a deep technical authority responsible for designing and evolving the most critical ML systems in the company.  The Principal Machine Learning Engineer will operate across training, inference, evaluation, and infrastructure, solving the hardest architectural and performance problems.  While Technical Leads may own execution at the team level, you set the technical standard and shape how ML systems are built across the organization.  This is a hands-on, high-impact role focused on depth.  This position is 100% Remote.

Principal Machine Learning Engineer Responsibilities:

- Architect and build large-scale ML systems spanning data, training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.

- Design reproducible, high-performance training pipelines across GPU infrastructure.

- Architect inference systems that balance latency, throughput, cost, and reliability at scale.

- Design and maintain data systems for high-quality synthetic and real-world training data.

- Implement evaluation pipelines covering performance, robustness, safety, and bias, in partnership with research leadership.

- Own production deployment, including GPU optimization, memory efficiency, latency reduction, and scaling policies.

- Collaborate closely with application engineering to integrate ML systems cleanly into backend, mobile, and desktop products.

- Make pragmatic trade-offs and ship improvements quickly, learning from real usage.

- Work under real production constraints: latency, cost, reliability, and safety

Principal Machine Learning Engineer Outcomes:

- ML systems (training, inference, evaluation) are reliable, scalable, and meet defined performance targets.

- Models deployed to production achieve measurable quality improvements and meet user-impact goals.

- Production issues are proactively monitored, debugged, and resolved with clear root-cause analysis.

- Team and cross-functional collaborators benefit from clear guidance, best practices, and scalable ML solutions.

- Research-to-production cycles are efficient, safe, and continuously improve the product experience.

Qualifications

Principal Machine Learning Engineer Qualifications:

- Strong background in deep learning and transformer-based architectures.

- Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience required.

- Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying large-scale ML models in production.

- Proficiency with at least one modern ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX), and ability to learn others quickly.

- Experience with distributed training and inference frameworks (e.g. DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray).

- Strong software engineering fundamentals; you write robust, maintainable, production-grade systems.

- Experience with GPU optimization, including memory efficiency, quantization, and mixed precision.

- Comfort owning ambiguous, zero-to-one ML systems end-to-end.

- A bias toward shipping, learning fast, and improving systems through iteration.

- Experience with LLM inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or FasterTransformer.

- Contributions to open-source ML or systems libraries.

- Background in scientific computing, compilers, or GPU kernels.

- Experience with RLHF pipelines (PPO, DPO, ORPO).

- Experience training or deploying multimodal or diffusion models.

- Experience with large-scale data processing (Apache Arrow, Spark, Ray).

Benefits include medical insurance, Dental, Vision, Savings Plan Options, PTO, etc.

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