Principal Gen AI Engineer

Overview: Who We Are

Collaborative. Respectful. A place to dream and do. These are just a few words that describe what life is like at Toyota. As one of the world’s most admired brands, Toyota is growing and leading the future of mobility through innovative, high-quality solutions designed to enhance lives and delight those we serve. We’re looking for talented team members who want to Dream. Do. Grow. with us.

An important part of the Toyota family is Toyota Financial Services (TFS), the finance and insurance brand for Toyota and Lexus in North America. While TFS is a separate business entity, it is an essential part of this world-changing company- delivering on Toyota's vision to move people beyond what's possible. At TFS, you will help create best-in-class customer experience in an innovative, collaborative environment.

To save time applying, Toyota does not offer sponsorship of job applicants for employment-based visas or any other work authorization for this position at this time.

Who We’re Looking For

Toyota Financial Services is seeking a passionate and highly-motivated Principal Gen AI Engineer. The primary responsibility of this role is to drive the design of secure, scalable, and modern applications, with a strong emphasis on AI and GenAI-enabling technologies.

Reporting to the National Manager, Domain Architecture Leader, this is a senior-level individual contributor role within the Architecture organization, focused on delivering hands-on solution designs and proofs of concept that bring innovative ideas to life. You will work closely with Domain Architects, product teams, and engineers to solve real business problems by developing good scalable GenAI Solutions.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design scalable and robust GenAI architectures using LLMs, multimodal models, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Fine-tune foundation models using domain-specific data.
• Implement prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
• Integrate GenAI capabilities into enterprise platforms using APIs, SDKs, and orchestration tools.
• Implement responsible AI practices including bias detection, hallucination mitigation, and explainability.
• Monitor and optimize model performance, latency, and cost.
• Use techniques like quantization, distillation, and caching to improve efficiency.
• Stay ahead of GenAI trends and emerging technologies.
• Drive experimentation with new models, agents, and frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.).
• Ensure compliance with data privacy, security, and regulatory standards.
• Evaluate and select appropriate model types (open-source vs proprietary) based on business needs.
• Lead hands-on solution evaluations, prototypes, and proofs of concept, especially for initiatives involving AI, GenAI, and emerging technologies.
• Make informed architectural trade-offs based on business needs, performance, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Contribute reusable patterns and documentation that support solution delivery across teams.
• Stay informed on trends in cloud services, architecture frameworks, and GenAI tooling.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering and development experience.
• Proven experience in building and deploying GenAI applications in production.
• Strong programming skills in Python and familiarity with GenAI libraries (Transformers, LangChain, Hugging Face, etc.).
• Deep understanding of LLMs, embeddings, vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with CI/CD for ML workflows and versioning tools like MLflow or DVC.
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and agent-based systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and building cloud-native solutions (preferably on AWS).
• Experience with modern architecture styles: microservices, APIs, event-driven systems.
• Strong ability to articulate technical solutions, trade-offs, and system behavior to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Added bonus if you have

• Exposure to GenAI tools and frameworks (e.g., LLMs, vector databases, prompt orchestration, LangChain, Bedrock).
• Familiarity with AWS AI/ML services (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, Comprehend, Lex).
• AWS AI certification.
• Financial Services experience.

What We’ll Bring

During your interview process, our team can fill you in on all the details of our industry-leading benefits and career development opportunities. A few highlights include:

• A work environment built on teamwork, flexibility, and respect.
• Professional growth and development programs to help advance your career, as well as tuition reimbursement.
• Team Member Vehicle Purchase Discount.
• Toyota Team Member Lease Vehicle Program (if applicable).
• Comprehensive health care and wellness plans for your entire family.
• Toyota 401(k) Savings Plan featuring a company match, as well as an annual retirement contribution from Toyota regardless of whether you contribute.
• Paid holidays and paid time off.
• Referral services related to prenatal services, adoption, childcare, schools, and more.
• Tax Advantaged Accounts (Health Savings Account, Health Care FSA, Dependent Care FSA).

Key skills/competency

• Generative AI (GenAI)
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Python Programming
• Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Vector Databases
• Prompt Engineering
• Machine Learning Operations (MLOps)
• Solution Architecture
• Data Privacy & Security
• Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)