Staff AI Engineer
Robots and Pencils2 months ago
Base Salary
$177k - $210k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems from research through production at scale.
- 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.
- Develop and optimize models and production agentic systems, including evaluation, observability, retrieval, reliability, safety, and cost optimization capabilities.
- 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 through production with attention to reliability, cost, and safety.
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 proven experience shipping complex agentic systems in production.
- Expert software engineering skills in Python or a similar language, with strong scalable-system design skills.
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings.
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools, plus experience building evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM applications.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques.
- API design experience integrating internal and third-party services 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 usage of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
- Ability to provide technical leadership, make architectural decisions, communicate complex tradeoffs, and mentor engineers.
Benefits
- Salary range of $177,375–$209,625 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.