Principal AI Engineer

At Hasbro, our mission is to entertain and connect generations of fans through the wonder of storytelling and exhilaration of play. We’re looking for adventurous and curious people who want to explore, experiment, and innovate to come up with the best ideas. Our culture has inspired our diverse team of highly skilled, highly creative, and highly committed individuals for 100 years and we believe the best is yet to come.
 

We're seeking a Principal Engineer to join as a founding technical leader on our mission to bring AI-driven play experiences to life! This is a hands-on role for an engineer passionate about: building with innovative large language models (LLMs), shaping the future of interactive play and entertainment, and architecting systems that are safe, reliable, and magical.

This is an execution-first role: you’ll be coding, prototyping, and shipping every day while establishing the foundation for a new, playful AI-driven platform. You'll be the first engineer on a new AI platform with Hasbro IP behind it with the authority to set technical standards and engineering culture right from the beginning.

This is a hybrid role and requires the ability to work onsite in our Pawtucket, RI office 3 days per week.

A day in the life as a Principal AI Engineer

• Bring Characters to Life: Engineer adaptive, safe, and delightful character interactions.
• Prototype Multimodal Interactions: Work across speech, text, vision, haptics, and sensors.
• Full-Stack Execution: Own backend APIs, integrate LLMs, and establish scalable cloud infrastructure.
• Build the Dev Pipeline: Stand up automated, pull request–based pipelines, CI/CD, and modern deployment practices from day one.
• Operational Excellence: Implement monitoring, telemetry, and data pipelines to support scaling and safety.
• Technical Due Diligence: Make trade-offs (cloud vs. edge, latency, hardware optimization).
• Recruit & Mentor: Help hire and mentor the early-stage engineering team.

What you’ll bring

• 8+ years in software engineering with a track record of shipping production systems.
• Proven experience building and shipping AI-powered products — consumer or enterprise.
• Hands-on experience with LLM integrations and ideally speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or dialogue systems.
• Deep familiarity with cloud-native architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure), APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and modern dev practices.
• Proficient in setting up monitoring, telemetry, and data management for live systems.
• Full-stack capability: comfortable across backend, infra, and light frontend work.
• Startup experience (0→1 or early-stage product development) strongly preferred.
• Pragmatic builder: knows when to prototype quickly vs. harden for scale.

We are an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer

Hasbro is committed to equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment. We are committed to making all employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, marital status, or any other legally protected status.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you have a disability and require assistance in this application process and need to request an accommodation, please contact your recruiter or coordinator.

The base salary range for this position is $163,040.00 to $244,560.00. The hiring range will vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location and market conditions. Additionally, employees may be eligible for annual and long-term incentives as part of their overall compensation package.

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package Includes:

• Health & Wellness: Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• Time Off to Recharge: Paid Vacation & Holidays
• Financial Well-being: Generous 401(k) Match
• Life & Family Support: Paid Parental Leave
• Giving Back: Volunteer & Employee Giving Programs
• Level Up Your Skills: Tuition Reimbursement
• Exclusive Perks: Product Discounts & More!

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