Principal Software Engineer - AIML

About the role

Nike is looking for a Principal Software Engineer in its Data & AI (DAI) team, based at its Tech Center in India. The team designs, builds and maintains scalable, intelligent and secure platforms that support decision-making, personalized consumer experiences and operational excellence across the global Nike ecosystem. The role suits someone who leads engineering teams, sets technical standards and guides teams through ambiguity.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the architectural vision, technical design and implementation of large-scale data and AI platforms, keeping them robust, secure and performant.
• Champion software development best practices, Agentic AI systems and ML cloud infrastructure, raising standards for code quality, reliability and maintainability across teams.
• Mentor and coach senior engineers and provide thought leadership on challenging engineering problems.
• Work with global product and business stakeholders to turn strategy into technology roadmaps aligned with business priorities.
• Promote automation, CI/CD, MLOps/DevOps, test-driven development and agile frameworks.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies and tools.
• Oversee project lifecycles from requirements and design to implementation, monitoring and optimization.
• Ensure platforms meet strict security, privacy and compliance standards.
• Act as a senior technical ambassador for the Tech Center in India with global teams.

Required profile

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Machine Learning or AI systems or a related field; a Master's in AI, Machine Learning or Generative AI is highly desired.
• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership or principal engineer capacity.
• Proven track record of leading engineering teams, delivering innovative solutions and driving organizational change at scale.
• Exceptional communication, leadership and stakeholder management skills, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Required skills

• Extensive experience building, deploying and scaling AI platforms, distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, with at least one platform using AWS SageMaker, Databricks, Azure ML or GCP Vertex AI.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, Java, Scala or Go.
• Deployed large-scale ML models in production; experience with LLMs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark and cloud-native MLOps tools.
• DevOps, automation, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Familiarity with agentic workflows and AI/LLM-powered enterprise applications.
• Security and compliance best practices in large-scale enterprise environments.