Senior Principal AI Engineer -Enfi
Unusual Ventures7 months ago
Boston, MA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Architect and build end-to-end AI systems with LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, agentic workflows, and structured reasoning.
- Lead the design of reliable multi-agent and tool-calling systems for production use.
- Establish architecture patterns for scalable, cost-aware, and observable AI applications.
- Drive technical decisions across data modeling, AI pipelines, infrastructure, and APIs.
- Define practices for AI evaluation, monitoring, and governance in production.
- Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and system-level debugging.
- Translate ambiguous business and domain problems into clear technical strategies.
- Stay current with emerging AI techniques and integrate relevant approaches.
- Help the organization remain in a fast, iterative builder mode as it grows.
Requirements
- 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production.
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript, React, Go, Python, and modern AI frameworks.
- Extensive experience with LLMs, RAG, tool use, prompt systems, and agentic architectures.
- Demonstrated ability to design and ship large-scale AI systems that operate reliably in real-world environments.
- Strong architectural judgment across data systems, AI models, infrastructure, and application layers.
- Deep understanding of AI failure modes including hallucination, drift, brittleness, latency, and cost increases.
- Excellent communication skills for explaining technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Track record of shipping complete systems rather than only prototypes or research work.
- Preferred: knowledge graph architecture, ontology design, semantic modeling, graph databases, graph query languages, graph ML, hybrid structured-reasoning and LLM systems, entity resolution, schema alignment, knowledge fusion, explainability, auditability, lineage tracking, regulated or high-stakes AI, MLOps, evaluation infrastructure, or long-running AI services.
Benefits
- Ownership of the technical direction for production AI systems.
- Hands-on leadership in an environment that values shipping, learning, and iteration over perfection.
- Latitude to shape both systems and how teams build them.
- Work on complex, ambiguous problems involving real customers and regulated environments.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Unusual Ventures
Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm that backs enterprise software—especially AI—startups and works closely with technical founders to reach product-market fit. It pairs capital with hands-on help in recruiting, customer development, marketing, and sales through its in-house operating team. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the firm leads seed rounds and focuses on building go-to-market foundations for early-stage companies.