Staff AI Engineer

Job Description

Staff AI Engineer (Applied AI, Agentic Systems & Product Engineering)

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Compensation: $240,000 - $270,000 + equity package

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Location: New York City Hybrid

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The Company

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A venture-backed technology company is building a modern operating system for a large, complex financial market still heavily dependent on spreadsheets and manual operational work. Its platform combines deterministic financial infrastructure with agentic AI designed to automate real customer workflows rather than simply answer questions.

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The Opportunity

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This is an early hire into a newly formed Applied AI engineering team and one of the highest-impact engineering roles in the business.

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You will help define how production-grade agents interact with complex financial systems, take actions on behalf of customers, and evolve from assistant-style interfaces into software capable of completing meaningful operational work.

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The Role

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You’ll work as a staff-level IC across software engineering, applied AI, infrastructure, and product.

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The emphasis is on being an exceptional engineer first: someone who can reason about complex systems, operate in ambiguity, and turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into reliable customer-facing software.

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What You’ll Do

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• Build customer-facing agentic product experiences that simplify complex, multi-step operational workflows.
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• Design and expand the systems that allow agents to safely interact with structured application data and execute actions.
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• Develop end-to-end AI workflows that replace repetitive, manual, and error-prone processes.
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• Productionize existing AI capabilities and improve their reliability, quality, monitoring, and failure handling.
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• Develop evaluation tooling and help define engineering standards for high-quality agentic systems.
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• Partner closely with product, engineers, domain experts, and customers to identify where AI can create meaningful product value.
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• Own ambiguous projects from initial problem definition through architecture, implementation, deployment, and iteration.
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What You’ll Bring

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• Strong senior-level software engineering experience with evidence of owning and shipping meaningful production systems.
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• Deep understanding of software architecture, system design, data flows, reliability, and production failure modes.
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• Backend or backend-leaning full-stack experience, with the ability to deliver features end to end when required.
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• Evidence of high ownership and agency, particularly in environments where problems and roadmaps are not fully defined.
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• Experience operating in high-performing engineering teams, scaling environments, or early-stage companies where individual contribution is highly visible.
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• Practical understanding of modern AI and agentic systems; this could come from production work, substantial side projects, or other hands-on building.
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• Strong communication skills and the ability to connect technical decisions with customer and product outcomes.
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What This Role Requires

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• Strong production software engineering and system-design capability.
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• Demonstrated ownership of complex technical projects rather than purely executing against a predefined roadmap.
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• Ability to operate comfortably in ambiguity and move between engineering, product, and infrastructure concerns when needed.
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• Hands-on understanding of agentic AI systems and their capabilities, limitations, and failure modes.
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• Ability to work effectively in a small, fast-moving team with broad individual ownership.
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Why Join

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• Join at the formation stage of an Applied AI team and help shape its architecture, engineering standards, product direction, and ways of working.
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• Build AI systems that perform consequential real-world workflows on top of sophisticated software infrastructure rather than adding a thin chatbot layer to an existing product.
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• Take on a highly visible role with direct exposure to customers, product leadership, and senior engineering stakeholders while working on technology central to the company’s next phase of growth.
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About People in AI

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People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.