Staff Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Key Details:

• Direct Hire/Perm
• Location: San Diego, CA - Hybrid Flex
• Pay: $175-200k base + equity

The Opportunity:

As a Staff AI Engineer, you will serve as the senior technical anchor for our San Diego engineering team. Success in this role is measured not only by the systems you create, but by the impact you have on the engineers around you. You will guide, mentor, and manage team members, establish best practices for designing and delivering AI solutions, and take an active role in developing engineering talent alongside your own technical contributions.

In addition to leading others, you will remain deeply involved in solving the most challenging technical problems across our client portfolio. This includes building sophisticated agent-based architectures, advanced document intelligence workflows, and automation solutions that support mission-critical business operations. When projects involve uncertainty, competing constraints, or a lack of clear answers, you are the person the team turns to for direction. Clients evaluate our work based on measurable business results, not proof-of-concept demonstrations.

This position reports to the Head of Client Engineering and will occasionally involve direct interaction with clients, helping stakeholders understand solution design, technical decisions, and project outcomes. The ideal candidate is equally motivated by helping others grow and by personally delivering exceptional engineering work.

What You'll Do:

• You'll help shape the future of how we leverage AI, creating impactful solutions that deliver meaningful value for our clients and differentiate our work in the market.

Team Leadership & Development:

• Lead, mentor, and manage two engineers based in San Diego, supporting their technical development, code quality, and delivery performance.
• Establish and maintain a high engineering standard through thoughtful code reviews, collaborative programming sessions, and foundational implementation patterns.
• Act as the primary escalation resource for complex technical challenges, coaching engineers as you help them work through difficult problems.
• Create and reinforce engineering practices, processes, and habits that continuously elevate team performance from quarter to quarter.

Technical Strategy:

• Guide architectural direction across client engagements, including agent-driven workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions, document processing systems, and production automation platforms.
• Assess emerging AI models, tools, frameworks, and methodologies, determining which technologies should become part of our production ecosystem.
• Convert learnings from client engagements into scalable internal assets, including reusable tools, templates, frameworks, and documentation.

Delivering Production-Ready AI Solutions:

• Remain actively involved in the design and delivery of our most advanced AI systems, overseeing the full lifecycle from orchestration and evaluation of LLMs to APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Make sound engineering decisions while balancing practical constraints such as timelines, existing systems, imperfect data, and business objectives.
• Deliver quickly while maintaining reliability, creating solutions that continue providing value long after implementation.

Client Engagement:

• Participate in client discussions when deeper technical expertise is required, explaining architectures, trade-offs, timelines, and progress.
• Transform loosely defined business challenges into actionable technical plans and system designs.
• Proactively communicate risks, constraints, trade-offs, and scope considerations to support successful outcomes for both clients and the engineering team.

What You Need to Succeed:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building and deploying production-grade LLM applications such as RAG systems, agents, and structured data extraction solutions.
• Proven experience leading engineers through mentorship or direct management, with a record of improving team performance through coaching, code review, and technical guidance. You are excited to continue managing direct reports.
• Advanced Python expertise paired with strong full-stack engineering skills and the judgment to prioritize dependable, maintainable technologies when appropriate.
• Hands-on experience operating production workloads in AWS, GCP, or Azure, including deployment, observability, maintenance, and long-term support.
• Strong knowledge of the modern AI ecosystem, including prompt engineering, context management, evaluation methodologies, embeddings, vector databases/search, and agent frameworks.
• Demonstrated success delivering complex, ambiguous projects from initial problem definition through architecture, implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Excellent English communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts and architectural decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders and executives.
• Experience working in consulting or client-facing environments, with the ability to move efficiently between different clients, industries, projects, and codebases.
• Located in San Diego, California, with dependable working-hour overlap with Colombia-based team members and clients.
• An AI-centric approach to work, leveraging AI tools daily to increase productivity and helping others adopt them effectively as part of their workflow.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, age, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, or military or veteran status. We consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with state and local laws, including the California Fair Chance Act, City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, and San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.