Staff AI Engineer
Robots and Pencils2 months ago
Remote, CanadaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex AI/ML systems from research through scalable production deployment.
- Build and evolve ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for reliable, repeatable model development and deployment.
- Design and deliver agentic systems, generative AI solutions, RAG pipelines, evaluation capabilities, and observability for LLM applications.
- Define AI architecture, engineering standards, responsible AI practices, and technical direction.
- Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to align AI strategy with business outcomes and communicate technical tradeoffs.
- Lead design reviews and technical discussions while mentoring junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing.
- Own ambiguous, high-stakes work with attention to reliability, safety, scalability, and cost optimization.
- Promote sophisticated use of Claude and Cursor and help the team adopt AI-forward engineering practices.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production.
- Deep hands-on experience with generative AI development and designing and shipping complex agentic systems.
- Expert software engineering skills in Python or a similar language, with strong scalable-system design ability.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including AWS services and AWS generative AI offerings.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools, plus experience building evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM applications.
- Strong knowledge of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines, including chunking, embeddings, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques.
- Experience architecting and integrating internal and third-party APIs at scale.
- Advanced cost optimization expertise covering token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization.
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Expert, day-to-day experience with AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
Benefits
- Salary range of CAD 176,612 to CAD 243,680.
- Work involves real, in-flight client and enterprise AI projects with production delivery targeted in 30 to 45 days.
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.