Principal Agentic AI Platform Engineer

About Avaya

Avaya is an enterprise software leader that helps the world’s largest organizations and government agencies forge unbreakable connections.

The Avaya Infinity™ platform unifies fragmented customer experiences, connecting the channels, insights, technologies, and workflows that together create enduring customer and employee relationships.

We believe success is built through strong connections – with each other, with our work, and with our mission. At Avaya, you'll find a community that values your contributions and supports your growth every step of the way.

Learn more at https://www.avaya.com

Position Overview

We are seeking a hands-on, forward-thinking Principal Platform Engineer to pioneer the integration of Agentic AI into our core engineering ecosystem. In this role, you will design, build, and scale reusable agentic systems that fundamentally transform both platform development and day-two operations.

Rather than treating AI agents merely as production-operation assistants, you will embed these intelligent capabilities into the very fabric of our engineering lifecycle. By extending established cloud-native practices with secure agent tooling and rigorous evaluation frameworks, you will establish a scalable blueprint for autonomous operations across the entire organization. This position demands a rare combination of startup-like urgency, hands-on technical ownership, and an unyielding commitment to security, compliance, and systems reliability.

Responsibilities

• Create a coherent agentic platform engineering approach: shared tool interfaces, reusable skills/workflows, coding conventions, evaluation harnesses, telemetry and adoption patterns.
• Develop agents and tools integrated with Terraform, Kubernetes, Argo CD/GitOps, cloud APIs, CI/CD, API gateways, Kafka, Redis, relational/document databases, observability and change-management systems.
• Accelerate platform development with AI-supported module/chart creation, code review, infrastructure plan interpretation, test generation, dependency analysis and safe pull-request workflows.
• Engineer day-two agents for health and drift detection, incident triage, correlated diagnostics, root-cause hypotheses, capacity analysis, upgrade readiness, runbook assistance and recovery verification.
• Build agentic development workflows for Kafka, Redis, relational/document database deployment and scaling, schema/configuration checks, upgrade planning, performance diagnosis, capacity assessments and secure API gateway changes.
• Use Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Thanos, Grafana Alloy and OpenTelemetry as operational signal sources; engineer safe telemetry retrieval, correlation, retention-aware queries and verifiable diagnostic recommendations.
• Build controlled operational workflows progressing from read-only diagnosis to recommended actions, gated changes and policy-authorized execution where justified.
• Enforce scoped identity, least privilege, environment isolation, secrets protection, prompt/tool-injection resistance, input/output validation, human approvals, audit trails, timeouts, budgets, kill switches and rollback boundaries.
• Implement evaluation of agent correctness, false positives, tool behavior, failure handling, security conformance and outcome quality before production rollout.
• Embed compliance requirements into agent workflows: explainable decisions, traceable evidence, approved change paths, data minimization and continuous control validation for FedRAMP/PCI DSS/SOC 2 environments.
• Partner with security, SRE/CloudOps and platform teams to define where agents may observe, recommend or act; document accountable owners and escalation paths.
• Coach engineers through pairing, playbooks, examples and metrics so agentic development becomes a team capability rather than one specialist’s project.
• Lead adoption by embedding agentic development into real platform delivery in a fast-paced environment; pair with engineers, ship working patterns quickly and improve them through measurement and feedback.
• Measure adoption and value through cycle time, manual toil removed, diagnostic lead time, quality, safe automation rate and reliability; avoid rewarding unchecked autonomy.

Required Experience

• 7+ years in software/platform engineering, DevOps or SRE with production Kubernetes, Terraform and GitOps depth.
• Strong Python or Go software engineering, API design, testing, integration and debugging skills.
• Hands-on building agentic workflows with LLM APIs, tool/function calling and orchestration; ability to explain working systems, evaluations and failure cases.
• Working understanding of Azure/GCP/AWS, identity, Kubernetes APIs, Argo CD, CI/CD, observability and change processes.
• Practical knowledge of Kafka, Redis, relational and document databases, API gateways and Kubernetes networking/security; ability to reason about scaling, deployment failures, observability and day-two recovery.
• Experience integrating with Prometheus/Grafana, Loki, Thanos, Alloy or comparable metrics, logging and telemetry backends to build reliable diagnostic workflows.
• Strong security judgment for privileged tools, least privilege, zero trust and data access in regulated enterprise environments.
• Ability to coach technical peers, standardize patterns and introduce new practices across teams without sacrificing operational reliability.
• Proven comfort with startup-like pace, ambiguous requirements, rapid iterations and shipping measurable engineering outcomes rather than demonstrations.

Preferred Experience

• MCP and agent-tool protocols, retrieval where useful, event-driven systems, policy engines, sandboxed execution and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Experience with FedRAMP, PCI DSS, SOC 2 technical evidence requirements and auditable automation.
• Cloud networking and platform services such as Istio, Keycloak, cert-manager, API gateways and DNS.
• Built or operated agents for diagnosis, remediation, deployment safety or infrastructure change at scale.

Education

Pay Transparency

The pay range for this opportunity is from $179,127 to $234,100 + benefits.  This range represents the anticipated low and high end of the salary plus bonus for this position. Actual total compensation will vary and is based on factors such as a candidate’s qualifications, skills, and competencies.

Sponsorship and Equal Opportunity

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Avaya is an Equal Opportunity employer and a U.S. Federal Contractor. Our commitment to equality is a core value of Avaya. All qualified applicants and employees receive equal treatment without consideration for race, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran or any other protected characteristic. In general, positions at Avaya require the ability to communicate and use office technology effectively. Physical requirements may vary by assigned work location.

This job brief/description is subject to change. Nothing in this job description restricts Avaya right to alter the duties and responsibilities of this position at any time for any reason.

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