Staff AI Engineer
Robots and Pencils1 day ago
Houston, TX, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$177k - $210k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems from research through production.
- Build and evolve scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for reliable model development and deployment.
- Define AI architecture, engineering standards, responsible AI practices, and long-term technical direction.
- Design and ship production agentic systems and generative AI solutions.
- Build evaluation frameworks, observability capabilities, RAG pipelines, and scalable API integrations.
- Optimize reliability, safety, and cost through techniques including caching, model routing, and quantization.
- Lead design reviews, communicate AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and align AI strategy with business outcomes.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production.
- Expert software engineering background using Python or a similar language, with strong scalable-system design skills.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, AWS services, and AWS generative AI offerings.
- Proven experience designing and shipping complex agentic systems in production.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools.
- Strong experience building evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM applications.
- Deep understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience with RAG pipelines, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques.
- Experience architecting and integrating internal and third-party APIs at scale.
- Advanced cost optimization expertise involving token economics, caching strategies, model routing, and quantization.
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Expert, day-to-day experience with Claude Code and Cursor.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus a 401(k) for eligible employees.
- The position is onsite in Houston 50% of the time.
- Employment may be conditional on completing a background check.
Tech Stack
Categories