Sr. Director, AI Platform Engineering

Foster City, CA | Development, Engineering | Director Level

The Impact of this Role at Coupa:

Coupa's AI platform already powers conversational and autonomous agents, frontier model integrations, production ML models, and customer-facing AI experiences through Navi and Agent Studio. The Sr. Director, AI Platform Engineering will lead the next phase of this platform, expanding our model training capabilities, deepening our data infrastructure, and scaling our AI-powered features across the full breadth of Coupa's enterprise suite. You will build and lead a team of engineers across the US and India, manage strategic technology partnerships, and deliver measurable improvements to model accuracy, efficiency, and coverage. This role reports to senior engineering leadership with regular visibility to C-level stakeholders.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the technical strategy and delivery roadmap for expanding Coupa's AI platform capabilities.
• Build and manage a high-performing engineering team across the US and India, hiring across ML, data engineering, and platform disciplines.
• Drive strategic partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providers.
• Define and prioritize AI use cases that deliver the highest accuracy and business impact, working closely with product leadership.
• Expand model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure beyond frontier model integrations.
• Own data strategy for AI, ensuring the right data pipelines, quality frameworks, and privacy-safe practices feed model development.
• Coordinate with existing AI platform, data platform, application platform, and cloud operations teams.
• Manage budget, hiring plan, and delivery milestones for the AI platform engineering organization.
• Present strategy, progress, and results to VP/SVP/C-level stakeholders.
• Ensure data safety, tenant isolation, and responsible AI practices across all AI capabilities.

What You Will Bring to Coupa:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership (Director or Sr. Director level).
• Track record building and leading AI/ML engineering teams of 15+ people across multiple geographies.
• Deep technical understanding of ML/AI systems, including model training, fine-tuning, RAG, and model serving. Must be able to evaluate technical decisions and challenge architects.
• Experience delivering AI/ML products in an enterprise B2B SaaS environment.
• Experience scaling engineering teams and shipping complex AI capabilities from concept to production.
• Strong partnership and vendor management experience with major AI and cloud providers.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale.
• Track record managing distributed teams across US and India.
• Excellent executive communication, translating technical strategy into business impact for C-level audiences.
• Understanding of data privacy, tenant isolation, and responsible AI practices.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture

Foster City, CA | Development, Engineering | Senior Level

The Impact of this Role at Coupa:

Coupa's AI platform powers production agents, conversational AI (Navi), customer-built agents (Agent Studio), and a suite of ML models for classification, fraud detection, and supplier intelligence. The Principal Engineer, AI/ML Architecture will define the technical direction for the next generation of these capabilities, designing how we train, evaluate, and serve models that are deeply tuned to enterprise spend management. Reporting to the Sr. Director, you will be hands-on in architecture and prototyping while guiding a growing team of ML and data engineers.

What You'll Do:

• Define the architecture for model training, evaluation, and serving across Coupa's AI platform.
• Evaluate and select model approaches (open-weight, commercial, and hybrid) against enterprise accuracy and cost requirements.
• Design evaluation frameworks that measure model quality on Coupa's specific task categories.
• Drive technical partnership evaluations with AI infrastructure and model providers.
• Architect training data pipelines, including synthetic data generation and quality validation.
• Design retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that extend our existing RAG infrastructure with structured knowledge retrieval.
• Establish technical standards for model safety, tenant data isolation, and responsible AI.
• Write code, review PRs, and prototype approaches, especially in the early phases.
• Mentor and guide ML and data engineers across US and India.
• Collaborate with product, existing AI platform, and cloud operations teams.

What You Will Bring to Coupa:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on ML/AI systems.
• Demonstrated experience training or fine-tuning large language models. Must have shipped a fine-tuned or domain-adapted model to production.
• Deep knowledge of transformer architectures, training optimization (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, RLHF, DPO), and inference serving.
• Experience with distributed training on GPU clusters.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, vector search, embedding models, and knowledge graph integration.
• Hands-on experience with cloud AI/ML services (model hosting, managed training, or equivalent).
• Experience designing and running custom evaluation suites for LLMs.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure tooling.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms preferred.