Principal Engineer, Data+AI Infrastructure (Big Data Platform)

About the role

Tencent Cloud's Big Data team is hiring a Principal Engineer in Singapore to help define data infrastructure for the AI era. The team builds data systems that power AI and brings AI into storage, compute and operations so infrastructure runs reliably with less manual effort. The role covers two areas: building data infrastructure for AI workloads, and using AI to make that infrastructure smarter. It involves hard problems in data throughput, CPU/GPU utilization and system reliability, setting technical direction and architecture from research through prototyping to production.

Key responsibilities

• Compute: build distributed compute engines for data and AI workloads, with query and operator optimization, CPU/GPU scheduling, workload forecasting and autoscaling.
• Storage: design storage architectures for large-scale, multimodal, fast-changing data, covering tiering, hot/cold detection, data layout, compression, caching and I/O optimization.
• Data and search: combine LLMs, agents and data systems for natural-language queries, text-to-SQL and automated analytics, and build search with query understanding, hybrid retrieval, embeddings, reranking, agentic search and RAG.
• Self-managing systems: build closed-loop monitoring, anomaly detection, root-cause analysis and automated remediation, with safeguards like evaluation, access controls, canary releases and rollbacks.
• Platform architecture: help design the next-generation cloud data platform for AI-native workloads, owning key modules or cross-module architecture.
• Research to production: identify high-impact problems, apply ML, LLMs, agents and reinforcement learning, train and distill in-house models, and share results through open source and top-tier conferences.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field, with 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems and networking, and strong system design skills.
• Excellent written and spoken English; Mandarin Chinese is required because about 50% of the role involves collaboration with China headquarters.
• Track record of leading architecture for large-scale core systems, mentoring engineers and running cross-team design reviews.

Required skills

• Expertise in at least one of C++, Python, Java, Go or Rust, with well-tested code and complex debugging.
• Hands-on experience building storage, compute, database, data or AI infrastructure systems; distributed storage, query engines, database internals, data lakehouses or resource scheduling preferred.
• Performance engineering: profiling, benchmarking and metrics to improve performance, stability and cost.
• Solid understanding of machine learning, LLMs or AI agents.
• Preferred: papers at top conferences (SIGMOD, OSDI, NeurIPS, etc.), hands-on AI-for-infrastructure projects, and open-source contributions.