Principal engineer architect lead industrial embedded on appliance

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Job Area

Engineering Group, Engineering Group > Systems Engineering

General Summary

• Hiring in Santa Clara or San Diego locations
  
  
  

Qualcomm is a global leader in connected intelligent edge, focusing on AI, edge computing and connectivity. Our fast‑growing Industrial and Embedded IoT (IE‑IoT) BU leads the transformation of industries through intelligent edge solutions that combine connectivity, compute, and AI. We expand our global talent in applied edge AI to support our customers’ digital transformation across many verticals and industries.

AI on‑prem Appliance is a new product line under IE‑IoT BU. This advanced AI solution is designed for generative AI inference and computer vision workloads on dedicated on‑premises hardware—allowing sensitive customer data, fine‑tuned models, and inference loads to remain on premises. It combines the accessibility and performance of a datacenter inference server with the power efficiency, form factor, privacy, personalization, and control of an on‑premises AI solution. Qualcomm AI Inference Suite provides ready‑to‑use AI applications and agents, tools, and libraries for operationalizing AI—from computer vision to generative AI—spanning on‑prem and cloud deployments.

Qualcomm is building end‑to‑end Edge AI solutions for Generative AI (LLM, VLM, VLA), Agentic AI, Voice AI, NLP and CV workloads that are commercially deployed on AI on-prem Appliance. Applications and use cases span various connected devices in on‑device, on‑prem, and hybrid cloud scenarios. As a Principal Systems Solutions Architect, you will define, develop, document and own scalable and customizable blueprints for different vertical solutions, lead hands‑on prototyping, and collaborate closely with customers, partners, product management, customer engineering and other internal teams to tailor deployments for enterprise customers across industries. We are seeking an experienced, hands-on expert with strong SW skills, solid knowledge of AI hardware, passionate about developing innovative genAI and hybridAI solutions with transformational impact to the industries.

Key Responsibilities

• Own solution blueprints: Design, develop, document, and maintain reference designs and delivery playbooks that accelerate repeatable GenAI/Hybrid‑AI deployments on AI on-prem Appliance across priority verticals (e.g., industrial, retail, smart spaces, healthcare, public sector).
• Vertical customization: Partner with Product Management, Account Managers, Regional teams, Engineering and field teams to adapt blueprints to customer‑specific requirements/KPIs , data, infrastructure, privacy/security, and compliance constraints; drive solution acceptance and production hand‑off.
• Be hands‑on: Proficient in SW skills; Design and develop reference designs, Build POCs and pilot systems; instrument, profile, and optimize models and pipelines end‑to‑end (latency, throughput, accuracy, cost, power/thermals, footprint).
• Multi‑model AI expertise: Apply and integrate LLMs, VLMs, VLAs, CV/CNN, and NLP stacks; select/quantize/prune/distill models; tune adapters; and integrate guardrails, retrieval, and evaluation frameworks.
• Solutions focus: Deliver production‑grade patterns for video analytics, enterprise GenAI (RAG, document AI, code & task copilots), and multimodal agents that interact with enterprise systems and tools.
• Hybrid AI architecture: Partition workloads across on‑device AI for a variety of edge devices, , on‑prem/edge boxes, and cloud AI; orchestrate data, models, and agents; design for offline/online modes, observability, and device management.
• Agentic AI: Architect and implement agentic workflows (multi‑agent planning, tool use/function calling, memory, safety) using Qualcomm platforms and industry frameworks; define KPIs and evaluation loops.
• Customer focus: Engage with customers from discovery to scale‑out; translate business objectives into measurable technical requirements; lead design reviews, roadmap alignment, and executive readouts.
• Cross‑functional leadership: Work with CE, Product Management, Solutions, Platform SW, Performance, Security, and Research to leverage existing knowledge and infrastructure, land features in reference design releases, software roadmaps and deliver outcomes.
• Innovation and Thought leadership: Create best‑practice guides, participate at leading industry events and workshops; stay abreast on the latest tech developments in the field, be aware of the competitive landscape, mentor engineers
  
  
  

This is an office based position located in San Diego, CA and is expected to comply with the company's onsite work policy

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 8+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.
  
  
  

OR

Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 7+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 6+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven track record (Principal level) architecting and shipping systems‑level AI solutions that combine application, runtime, and platform considerations (performance, power, memory, cost, security).
• Deep hands‑on proficiency with LLM/VLM/CV/NLP model lifecycles: selection, fine‑tuning/LoRA, compression/quantization, runtime integration, and hardware‑aware optimization and deployment
• Expertise designing hybrid AI: placing workloads across device/edge/cloud; knowledge of data pipelines, streaming/vision services, vector/RAG stores, feature stores, and observability.
• Strong software engineering foundations (Python/C++), containerization, AI accelerators, and profiling tools; fluency with modern inference/runtime stacks.
• Customer‑facing experience on launching new AI-enabled products working with engineering and product management teams to drive POCs to production with clear KPIs
• Excellent communication and leadership skills to influence across teams and with customers/peers and executives.
• Experience building video analytics pipelines (tracking, action/event detection, privacy filters), and integrating them with enterprise VMS/IoT backbones and AI based vision solutions
• Designing and deploying agentic AI systems (multi‑agent planners, tool ecosystems, policy/guardrails, eval harnesses); familiarity with orchestration frameworks and agent runtimes.
• Model/system benchmarking and E2E evaluation (latency/accuracy/cost/power), testing, and operations for AI at the edge.
• Background with Qualcomm AI platforms and heterogenous acceleration; familiarity with on‑device inference and memory/power budgeting.
• Domain exposure in one or more verticals: industrial automation/IIoT, retail analytics, healthcare operations, smart buildings/cities, logistics, or public sector.
• Graduate degree in CS/EE/CE or equivalent applied experience.
• 15+ years of hands-on experience as an individual contributor with 10+ years in the AI/ML fields.
  
  
  

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail disability-accomodations@qualcomm.com or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

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Pay Range And Other Compensation & Benefits

$220,200.00 - $330,400.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.