Staff Engineer / AI Builder - Mountain View
Robots and Pencils3 hours ago
Base Salary
$166k - $228k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and build agentic workflows using reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and single- and multi-agent architectures.
- Build and maintain RAG pipelines with chunking, embeddings, OpenSearch vector search, re-ranking, and refresh handling.
- Integrate AWS Bedrock and Agent Core, including MCP-based tool design and tool orchestration.
- Write production system prompts with structured role framing, output constraints, and few-shot design.
- Build LLM evaluation and observability using golden datasets, RAGAS-style metrics, LLM-as-judge, and tracing tools such as LangFuse or LangSmith.
- Design resilience for LLM-backed systems using retries, backoff and jitter, circuit breakers, fallback models, and degradation handling.
- Build Python and Node.js backend services and AWS Lambda/API Gateway serverless architectures.
- Design DynamoDB single-table schemas for conversation state, agent memory, and session history.
- Support event-driven orchestration with Step Functions, SQS, and EventBridge.
- Contribute to frontend integration, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and production hardening in cloud-native environments.
- Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, guide architecture discussions, and own features and releases end-to-end.
Requirements
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful production experience shipping GenAI/LLM-powered systems.
- Hands-on expertise in agentic AI, including reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and multi-agent orchestration.
- Practical RAG expertise covering chunking, embeddings, vector databases, cosine similarity search, and re-ranking.
- Experience building LLM evaluation and observability systems with golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, RAGAS or comparable metrics, and tracing tools such as LangFuse or LangSmith.
- Strong production prompt-engineering skills, including structured prompts and constraints.
- Hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock, Agent Core, Lambda, DynamoDB single-table design, S3, SQS, EventBridge, and Step Functions.
- Strong Python and Node.js skills with experience building full-stack applications and RESTful APIs.
- Understanding of production reliability patterns such as retries/backoff, circuit breakers, and fallback models.
- Experience with Docker, containerization, and cloud-native deployment.
- Ability to own ambiguous, integration-heavy problems and provide technically deep architectural judgment.
- Helpful qualifications include Bedrock Agent Core experience, MCP tool wiring, memory/session management, gateway provisioning, regulated-domain experience, workflow orchestration experience, and production LLM observability experience.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus a 401(k) for eligible employees.
- Mountain View role with compensation listed at $165,604–$228,491 USD annually.
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.