Staff AI Architect
Robots and Pencils4 hours ago
Base Salary
$146k - $202k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define AI system architecture and lead design across LLM applications, agentic systems, retrieval, and ML model serving.
- Drive RAG and context-engineering strategy, including hybrid retrieval, reranking, chunking, and embedding model selection.
- Lead multi-agent orchestration design using LangGraph, Amazon Bedrock Agents, or AgentCore.
- Own AWS model serving and inference architecture, optimizing latency, throughput, and cost.
- Define LLMOps and MLOps standards, including prompt versioning, evaluation pipelines, and feature stores.
- Establish evaluation, guardrails, observability, tracing, responsible AI, governance, data isolation, and prompt-injection defenses.
- Lead technical decisions involving fine-tuning, prompting, RAG, and tool use.
- Partner with leadership and clients to translate business goals into AI architecture decisions.
- Document AI architectures, evaluation standards, and reusable patterns.
- Establish architectural standards, mentor engineers, handle complex technical escalations, and evaluate emerging technologies.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in AI/ML architecture or technical leadership roles.
- Deep expertise in LLM and agentic application architecture, multi-agent orchestration, and tool-calling patterns.
- Strong experience designing production RAG and retrieval systems, including hybrid retrieval, reranking, and vector store selection.
- Strong AWS model serving and inference optimization experience focused on latency, throughput, and cost.
- Deep understanding of LLMOps, MLOps, evaluation pipelines, prompt versioning, CI/CD, and AI workload observability.
- Experience with AI evaluation, guardrails, and tracing tooling.
- Expert software engineering background with proficiency in Python and at least one of TypeScript, Java, or Go.
- Strong cloud-native architecture experience involving microservices, serverless, containerization, and event-driven systems.
- Understanding of responsible AI and governance, including data isolation, prompt-injection defense, and compliance.
- Demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring experience.
- Expert day-to-day knowledge of AI-forward tools such as Claude and Cursor.
- AWS AI certifications, fine-tuning or model customization experience, and responsible AI experience are preferred.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance, and a 401(k) for eligible employees.
- Employment may be conditional on successful completion of a background check.
- The posting includes a compensation range of $146,071 to $201,541 USD.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Robots and Pencils
Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs, builds, and runs production AI systems and agentic co-workers for enterprise operations, with a focus on AWS. The privately held company, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, provides consulting and implementation services spanning data readiness, cloud modernization, and AI enablement. It is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with delivery teams across the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.