Staff AI Engineer
$177,375–$209,625 year
HybridHouston, Texas, United States
Job Summary
Lead the design and implementation of complex ML/AI systems end-to-end, owning architecture decisions and driving solutions from research through production at scale. Build and evolve scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure that support reliable, repeatable model development and deployment across teams. Define AI architecture and engineering standards while mentoring junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing on hard problems. Partner with product and leadership to shape AI strategy, translating technical tradeoffs into clear narratives that drive decision-making across stakeholders. Take ownership of ambiguous, high-stakes work, ensuring reliability, cost efficiency, and safety in production environments. Work onsite in Houston 50% of the time as a key technical leader contributing to the mission of designing AI systems for a human world.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years professional software engineering experience
- 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production
- deep hands-on experience with generative AI development
- Expert software engineering background (Python or similar)
- strong design sensibilities for scalable, maintainable systems
- Deep expertise with cloud platforms, including in-depth understanding of AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings
- Proven track record designing and shipping complex agentic systems in production environments
- Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools
- Strong experience with evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM apps
- Deep understanding of AI safety, responsible AI principles, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling
- Extensive experience building RAG pipelines: chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval techniques
- API design experience, including architecting and integrating with internal and third-party services at scale
- Advanced cost optimization expertise: token economics, caching strategies, model routing, quantization
- Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments
- Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and expert knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor
- This position will be onsite in Houston 50% of the time
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