Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer | San Diego, CA
$165,000–$200,000 year
HybridSan Diego, California, United States
Job Summary
Manage and mentor two engineers on the San Diego team, owning their technical growth, code quality, and delivery through rigorous code review and pairing. Drive architecture decisions for client builds including agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and document processing while evaluating new models for the production toolkit. Stay hands-on with complex systems from LLM orchestration to data pipelines, making pragmatic build decisions under real constraints to ship fast without sacrificing reliability. Join client calls to walk stakeholders through system designs and translate ambiguous business problems into concrete delivery plans. Flag risks early to protect client outcomes and team delivery.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- 2+ years building LLM-powered systems (RAG, agents, structured extraction) that run in production
- Demonstrated technical leadership: engineers you have mentored or managed got measurably better because of your code review, pairing, and guidance
- Expert-level Python
- strong full-stack fundamentals
- Production cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including deploying, monitoring, and maintaining systems that clients depend on daily
- Deep working knowledge of the modern AI stack: prompt and context engineering, evaluation, embeddings, vector search, and agent orchestration frameworks
- A track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes projects end to end, from problem framing through architecture, build, and post-launch iteration
- Fluent English and clear communication on client calls
- Consulting-environment adaptability: comfort switching between client contexts, industries, and codebases without losing momentum
- Based in San Diego, CA
- reliable overlap with Colombia business hours
- An AI-first working style: you use these tools daily to multiply your own output and teach the team to do the same
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