Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Robots & Pencils is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the design and delivery of AI/ML systems. This role involves architectural decision-making, technical leadership, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to shape AI strategy and ensure the integration of AI systems into enterprise operations.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems end-to-end, owning architecture decisions and driving solutions from research through production at scale
- Build and evolve scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure that support reliable, repeatable model development and deployment across teams
- Set the standard for AI-forward engineering, using tools like Claude and Cursor with sophistication and helping the team adopt them effectively
- Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to shape AI strategy and align technical direction with business outcomes
- Translate complex AI tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities into clear narratives that drive decision-making across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Lead design reviews and technical discussions, raising the bar for engineering rigor and constructive challenge across the team
- Define AI architecture and engineering standards, bringing depth on tradeoffs, long-term implications, and responsible AI practices
- Mentor and grow junior and mid-level engineers, multiplying impact through coaching, code reviews, and pairing on hard problems
- Take ownership of the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of work, driving them through to production with care for reliability, cost, and safety
Skills
- 7+ years professional software engineering experience, with 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production and deep hands-on experience with generative AI development
- Expert software engineering background (Python or similar) with strong design sensibilities for scalable, maintainable systems
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including in-depth understanding of AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings
- Proven track record designing and shipping complex agentic systems in production environments
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools
- Strong experience with evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM apps, including building these capabilities where they don't yet exist
- Deep understanding of AI safety, responsible AI principles, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines: chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques
- API design experience, including architecting and integrating with internal and third-party services at scale
- Advanced cost optimization expertise: token economics, caching strategies, model routing, quantization
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments
- Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and expert knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor
Company Overview
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