Principal AI Enablement Engineer

Verisign helps enable the security, stability, and resiliency of the internet. We are a trusted provider of internet infrastructure services for the networked world and deliver unmatched performance in domain name system (DNS) services. We are a mission focused, values driven company where each individual can contribute to building a stronger, more secure internet. We offer a dynamic and flexible work environment with competitive benefits and the ability to grow your career. We are building a new engineering team responsible for establishing and operating the company's on-premises Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Model (LLM) platform. The Principal Engineer will serve as the senior technical authority for the platform and will help define how AI capabilities are safely, reliably, and effectively implemented throughout the company. This is a hands-on technical leadership position. The successful candidate will combine strong systems and infrastructure engineering skills with practical knowledge of modern LLMs, inference platforms, developer tooling, and AI-assisted workflows in an enterprise environment. The Principal Engineer will have substantial influence over architecture, technology selection, engineering standards, operational practices, and the long-term technical direction of the platform. This must be accomplished while continuing the Protect / Grow / Manage framework that guides the company. Key Responsibilities: • Serve as the principal technical authority for the company's on-premises AI and LLM architecture • Design, implement, operate, and evolve production LLM inference platforms • Evaluate and recommend models, inference engines, developer tools, agent frameworks and supporting technologies • Develop repeatable evaluation methodologies for determining model quality, performance, reliability and suitability for company workloads • Work with Information Security teams to design secure mechanisms for applying LLMs to proprietary source code, internal data, documentation, and analytical workloads • Develop and work with engineering teams to create the most appropriate AI-assisted software engineering capabilities. This includes coding agents, tool use, repository integration, retrieval systems, and related developer workflows • Enhance existing engineering practices and update them to perform, model deployment, upgrades, rollback, observability, capacity planning and incident response • Work closely with security and infrastructure teams to establish appropriate controls for sensitive corporate information • Evaluate emerging AI technologies and distinguish technologies suitable for production use from experimental or immature approaches • Prototype new capabilities and convert successful experiments into reliable production services • Mentor other engineers on the AI platform team and provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries • Work directly with internal users to identify high-value applications for AI, including software development, data analysis, automation, and knowledge retrieval Required Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Telecommunications, or related field or equivalent experience • 15+ years computer engineering experience • Extensive experience designing, operating or troubleshooting complex production systems • Strong Linux systems engineering experience • Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, storage, containers, and modern infrastructure platforms • Experience with modern software development practices, source control, CI/CD, automation, and infrastructure-as-code • Strong programming or scripting ability in languages such as Python, Go, C/C++ or equivalent • Practical experience deploy