Staff AI Engineer
Robots and Pencils23 hours ago
Lviv, UkraineStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems from research through production.
- Build scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for repeatable model development and deployment.
- Define AI architecture, engineering standards, responsible AI practices, and long-term technical direction.
- Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to align AI strategy with business outcomes.
- Lead design reviews and technical discussions while communicating AI tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing.
- Own ambiguous, high-stakes work with attention to reliability, cost, safety, and production quality.
- Use and help standardize AI-forward coding tools including Claude and Cursor.
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 complex agentic systems in production.
- Expert software engineering ability with Python or a similar language and strong scalable-system design skills.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, AWS services, and AWS GenAI offerings.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools, plus experience building evaluation and observability capabilities for LLM applications.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines involving chunking, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval.
- Experience designing APIs and integrating internal and third-party services at scale.
- Advanced cost optimization experience covering token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization.
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Expert day-to-day use of Claude Code and Cursor.
- Experience mentoring engineers and shaping AI engineering practices across a team or organization.
- Strong problem-solving skills and sound judgment in ambiguous technical and business situations.
Benefits
- 20 days of paid vacation.
- 15 days of unpaid vacation.
- Official public holidays off.
- 5 paid sick days without a doctor's certificate.
- Medical insurance.
- Military draft deferment support.
- Cooperation under a gig-contract.
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.