Principal Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Let’s be unstoppable together!

Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high-quality data set.

At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives. We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings. By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work. Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®. This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at Circana.

Role Overview

Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. AI/Agentic Architects lead that work solution by solution. Embedded with the experts who hold the domain knowledge, they design the agents, set the patterns, and own the outcome from first conversation to production use. Each architect anchors a pod of engineers and carries the technical direction for a solution family for the length of a build.

Job Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of agentic systems for a solution family, from domain discovery through production use.
• Translate domain expertise into intent ontologies, tool contracts, and evaluation sets, working directly with subject matter experts.
• Own harness engineering: context management, tool contracts and MCP servers, guardrails, retries and graceful degradation, tracing and replay.
• Establish evaluation as infrastructure: golden traces, regression suites, routing tests, offline and online measurement.
• Set reusable patterns (shared services, tools, and conventions) that make every subsequent build faster than the last.
• Anchor a pod of engineers: set technical direction, review the work, and raise the bar.
• Represent the work credibly to product owners, architects, security, executives, and client stakeholders.

Requirements

• A strong track record of designing and shipping agentic systems into production for real users.
• Deep production fluency with agent orchestration frameworks: LangGraph, Google ADK, or Microsoft Agent Framework.
• Production experience across multiple model families, with clear judgment on when to reach for which.
• Production experience on at least one major cloud AI stack.
• Mastery of the practical craft: context management, prompt design, plan generation, structured outputs, and tool design.
• Daily fluency with agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.
• Command of the agentic development lifecycle: specs as source of truth, evals as continuous integration, prompt and tool versioning, and trace-driven debugging.
• Communication that lands at every altitude: engineers, domain experts, and senior executives alike.

Preferred

• Consumer goods, retail, or large-scale measurement data background.
• Prior forward deployed or field engineering experience at an AI or data company.
• Public artifacts: talks, open source, technical writing.

Tech Stack & Tools

• Orchestration: LangGraph, Google ADK, Microsoft Agent Framework
• Models: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, open-weight families
• Cloud: GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry
• Protocols: MCP, A2A, AG-UI, A2UI
• Engineering: Python, TypeScript, Claude Code
• Delivery: evaluation harnesses as CI, tracing and observability tooling

Circana Behaviors

Beyond technical skills, experience, and role-specific attributes, these shared behaviors are fundamental to our culture and success. We seek individuals who consistently demonstrate and champion these behaviors in their daily work:

• Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.
• Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.
• Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.
• Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.
• Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.
• Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.
• Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.

Location: This position can be located in the following area(s): Chicago, IL (Hybrid) or NYC, NY (Hybrid)

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is $200,000 USD to $250,000 USD.

This job is also eligible for bonus pay.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.

You can apply for this role through the Circana careers website or Intranet site for internal candidates. This role is subject to AI-assisted screening. Circana uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assess resumes for alignment with job requirements by helping locate details in resumes that relate to the job description.

This position is expected to remain open for approximately 30 days and may close earlier if sufficient qualified candidates are identified.