Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture - 11310

Role Summary

The Impact of a Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture at Coupa:

Coupa's AI platform powers production agents, conversational AI (Navi), customer-built agents (Agent Studio), and a suite of ML models for classification, fraud detection, and supplier intelligence. The Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture will define the technical direction for the next generation of these capabilities, designing how we train, evaluate, and serve models that are deeply tuned to enterprise spend management. Reporting to the Sr. Director, you will be hands-on in architecture and prototyping while guiding a growing team of ML and data engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture for model training, evaluation, and serving across Coupa's AI platform.
• Evaluate and select model approaches (open-weight, commercial, and hybrid) against enterprise accuracy and cost requirements.
• Design evaluation frameworks that measure model quality on Coupa's specific task categories.
• Drive technical partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providers.
• Architect training data pipelines, including synthetic data generation and quality validation.
• Design retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that extend our existing RAG infrastructure with structured knowledge retrieval.
• Establish technical standards for model safety, tenant data isolation, and responsible AI.
• Write code, review PRs, and prototype approaches, especially in the early phases.
• Mentor and guide ML and data engineers across US and India.
• Collaborate with product, existing AI platform, and cloud operations teams.

Benefits

What You Will Bring to Coupa

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on ML/AI systems.
• Demonstrated experience training or fine-tuning large language models. Must have shipped a fine-tuned or domain-adapted model to production.
• Deep knowledge of transformer architectures, training optimization (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, RLHF, DPO), and inference serving.
• Experience with distributed training on GPU clusters.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, vector search, embedding models, and knowledge graph integration.
• Hands-on experience with cloud AI/ML services (model hosting, managed training, or equivalent).
• Experience designing and running custom evaluation suites for LLMs.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure tooling.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms preferred.

The successful candidate’s starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.

At Coupa, we are 100% committed to creating and nurturing an environment that supports your physical, mental, and community well-being. We offer a comprehensive suite of benefits designed to help you and your family thrive:

Global Well-Being Perks (For All Employees Globally)

• Global Wellness Days: Enjoy two designated, company-wide paid wellness days off each year (typically the first Friday in March and the last Friday in September) so the entire global team can unplug, step away, and recharge together .
• Birthday Time-Off: Celebrate your day! Coupa provides a paid day off on your birthday or another day of your choice within your birthday month .
• Volunteer Time Off (VTO): Giving back is in our DNA. We offer 40 hours of paid VTO annually to support the community initiatives and volunteer programs you are passionate about .
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Access free, confidential, 24/7/365 counseling and resources for emotional support, work-life solutions, financial advice, legal guidance, and support for new parents .
• Business Travel Protection: Travel with peace of mind. Zurich Travel Assist provides medical, safety, pre-trip planning, and emergency support during any business travel .
• Referral Bonus Program: Share the Coupa experience! Receive generous monetary referral bonuses when you successfully refer talented friends or acquaintances who are hired into open roles .

Please note: In addition to these global well-being perks, Coupa offers highly competitive, location-specific benefits packages (which include comprehensive medical/dental insurance, retirement/pension plans, and life or accident protection) tailored to your primary work location. Your recruiter will walk you through the specific regional benefits package for this role during the interview process.

Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.

Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa’s Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.

About the Company

Why join Coupa?

Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.

The Impact of a Sr Lead Network Reliability Engineer at Coupa:

Coupa Software is a high-growth SaaS company and market leader in the BSM (Business Spend Management) space. We are in a major growth phase and wish to expand our Network Reliability Engineering team to help transform and scale our leading cloud platform.

Joining the team as a Sr. Lead Network Development Engineer, will provide you the opportunity to make a huge impact and take your career to the next level. You will bring an automation-first approach to your day-to-day activities, architecting solutions for a massive-scale cloud networking infrastructure through code and have a strong sense of service ownership and accountability. You will be supported through in-house training and certification on our Coupa University platform and through subscriptions with leading learning partners.

Coupa operates an open and autonomous work culture, where employees are challenged and critical thinking is encouraged. We operate an inverted organization structure, meaning we support our employees, not manage them. This is core to our culture and we do everything we can to foster an entrepreneurial spirit within our team as we strive for personal and organizational excellence.