Principal Engineer, Agentic AI

VF CORPORATION

Principal Agentic AI Engineer

ABOUT VF CORPORATION

Founded in 1899 and headquartered in Denver Colorado VF Corporation is one of the worlds largest apparel footwear and accessories companies. VFs portfolio of iconic outdoor active and lifestyle brands includes The North Face Vans Timberland Altra Smartwool Icebreaker Kipling Napapijri Eastpak and JanSport. VF markets its products across the Americas EMEA and Asia-Pacific through wholesale partnerships branded retail stores and a growing direct-to-consumer ecommerce ecosystem.

Agentic AI represents a critical acceleration capability - enabling VF to automate complex workflows augment human decision-making and create intelligent systems across every function and every touchpoint.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Principal Agentic AI Engineer is a hands-on technical leader embedded in VF Corporations centralized Agentic AI team. This team operates as a cross-brand cross-region Center of Excellence that builds and deploys AI agents for every brand in VFs portfolio and every function in VFs enterprise.

This role carries a dual mandate that is critical to VFs agentic AI strategy:

1. Own the pro-code development of production-grade agentic AI building custom agents multi-agent orchestration complex integrations and bespoke solutions that require deep engineering expertise.

2. Evangelize and enable low-code development across brand and business functions empowering citizen developers to build extend and maintain their own agents while establishing the guardrails patterns templates and governance that make decentralized agent creation safe and effective.

You are the engineer who builds the hardest agents yourself and makes it possible for everyone else at VF to build the rest. You set the architectural patterns create the reusable components establish the integration connectors and define the quality standards that the entire VF organization inherits.

• Platform Polyglot: You think in terms of agent platforms and frameworks as a portfolio - the right tool for each job. Copilot Studio for enterprise productivity & Azure AI Foundry for custom builds.

• Governance by Design: governance is what makes innovation scalable. Build guardrails into every template every connector and every training so that decentralized agent creation is safe.

CORE PLATFORM RESPONSIBILITIES

Microsoft Copilot Studio Low-Code Enablement & Pro-Code Extension

• Own the pro-code extension layer for Copilot Studio building custom connectors developing Power Platform dataflows and custom actions; and creating reusable component libraries.

• Implement advanced Copilot Studio capabilities multi-agent orchestration Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval workflows and Copilot Tuning.

• Build and enforce governance standards: lifecycle management naming conventions environment management DLP policies Entra Agent ID configuration telemetry and analytics and cost tracking.

• Develop the integration between Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry creating seamless upgrade paths where agents that outgrow Copilot Studios capabilities.

Azure AI Foundry Custom Agentic Application Development

• Architect and build production-grade custom agentic applications on Azure AI Foundry using Azure OpenAI Service Azure AI Search Azure AI Agent Service Prompt Flow and Semantic Kernel.

• Build and maintain VFs custom RAG pipelines and vector databases and develop agent evaluation and testing infrastructure on Azure: building task-specific benchmarks LLM-as-judge evaluation pipelines red-team testing harnesses and regression test suites.

• Implement agent observability tracing monitoring Application Insights and custom telemetry -providing VFs Agentic AI team with real-time visibility into performance cost error rates and impact.

• Contribute to VFs responsible AI practices by implementing guardrails content safety filters PII detection and masking prompt injection defenses and bias mitigation across all Azure AI Foundry.

LOW-CODE EVANGELISM & CITIZEN DEVELOPER ENABLEMENT

• Design and deliver training for Copilot Studio structured in tiers: Foundational (business analysts building first agents) Intermediate (power users adding custom connectors and knowledge sources) and Advanced (technical builders using MCP HITL and multi-agent patterns).

• Build and publish VFs Agent Developer Guide and an agent template gallery - a curated library of pre-built governance-approved agent design patterns connector libraries governance requirements testing standards and deployment checklists.

• Track and govern developer adoption metrics: count usage business value delivered by decentralized agents and quality/governance compliance ratesdemonstrating the ROI.

• Identify when citizen-built agents are hitting the ceiling of low-code capabilities and transition them to pro-code solutions either by extending with custom connectors or migrating to Azure AI Foundry.

TECHNICAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Architecture & Design

• Design the integration layer between VFs agent platforms and enterprise systems of record using custom connectors APIs MCP servers and event-driven architectures.

• Architect secure performant RAG pipelines that ground VFs agents in enterprise knowledge with proper chunking embedding indexing and retrieval strategies.

• Establish VFs standards for agent memory state management and context handling across both short-lived conversational interactions and long-running autonomous workflows.

Development & Delivery

• Write production-quality code (TypeScript Python C#) for custom agents orchestration logic tool integrations evaluation pipelines and deployment automation on Azure AI Foundry.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for agent development across both Copilot Studio and AI Foundry and develop custom connectors and MCP servers that expose VFs enterprise systems to agents.

• Implement comprehensive agent testing: unit tests for tool functions integration tests for system connectors evaluation tests using LLM-as-judge and human review and performance testing.

Governance & Quality

• Define and enforce VFs agent quality standards across both pro-code and citizen-built agents: accuracy hallucination tolerance response SLAs cost and brand voice.

• Implement governance automation for Copilot Studio: DLP policies Entra Agent ID enforcement environment controls agent publishing approval workflows and automated compliance scanning.

• Build VFs agent observability stack: dashboards showing agent health usage cost quality scores escalation rates and business impact across all brands and functions

• Own incident response for production agent issues: rapid diagnosis remediation root cause analysis and post-incident improvements.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 8 years of software engineering experience (Senior) or 12 years (Principal) with at least 2 years focused on AI/ML systems conversational AI or agentic AI platforms.

• Deep hands-on expertise with Copilot Studio including both low-code authoring (topics knowledge actions agent flows) and pro-code extension (custom connectors Power Platform components ALM).

• Strong production experience with Azure AI Foundry (Azure OpenAI Service Azure AI Search Prompt Flow Semantic Kernel Azure AI Agent Service) building custom agentic applications.

• Proficiency in at least two additional agent frameworks beyond the Microsoft ecosystem: LangChain/LangGraph AutoGen CrewAI or comparable orchestration frameworks.

• Deep understanding of agentic AI patterns: multi-agent orchestration tool-use and function calling RAG architectures embedding strategies evaluation methodologies guardrails and MCP.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: TypeScript Python or C#; RESTful and GraphQL API design; event-driven architectures; CI/CD; infrastructure-as-code (Bicep Terraform); containerization.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to present to both engineering peers and business leaders translating technical concepts into business-relevant language.

• Bachelors degree in computer science AI/ML Engineering or a related field. Masters preferred.

• Experience with Sierra AI or comparable AI platforms for consumer-facing customer service agents.

• Background in Power Platform administration governance and toolkit deployment.

#LI-JB2

Hiring Range:

Incentive Potential: This position is eligible for additional compensation awards that may include an annual incentive plan sales incentive orcommissionpotential. Specific details of the additional compensation eligibility for this position will be provided during the recruiting and interview process.

Benefits at VF Corporation: You can review a general overview of each benefit program offered including this years medical plan rates on and by clicking Looking to Join VF Detailed information on your benefits will be provided during the hiring process.

Please note our hiring ranges are determined and built from market pay determining the specific compensation for this position we comply with all local state and federal laws.

At VF we value a diverse inclusive workforce and we provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees. All qualified applicants for employment will be considered without regard to an individuals race color sex gender identity gender expression religion age national origin or ancestry citizenship physical or mental disability medical condition family care status marital status domestic partner status sexual orientation genetic information military or veteran status or any other basis protected by federal state or local laws. If you require accommodations during the application process please contact us at . VF will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals to the extent required by applicable law.

Pursuant to all applicable local Fair Chance Ordinance requirements including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance VF will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.