Senior AI Engineer

Role Description

As a Senior AI Engineer (Full-Stack / Applications), you will design, build, and operate production-grade, cloud-native applications with AI at their core. This role sits at the intersection of strong software engineering and deep AI expertise, focusing on turning state-of-the-art AI capabilities into robust, scalable, and high-quality user-facing products.

• Own AI-powered features end-to-end, from scoping, design, and requirements engineering to feature evaluation, deployment, and operation.
• Design, build, and maintain cloud-native, event-driven AI applications across the full stack.
• Evaluate, integrate, and optimize AI models for production use, balancing quality, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional team members, including non-technical stakeholders, to refine requirements and align technical solutions with business objectives.
• Build and maintain robust AI inference, evaluation, and monitoring pipelines.
• Develop and implement robust, automated AI application evaluation frameworks.
• Analyze AI application performance data and experiments, using insights for data-driven improvements.
• Operate and improve production systems, taking ownership of reliability, quality, and technical debt.
• Stay current with AI advancements and share knowledge to upskill the team.
• Plan, track, and break down work effectively in an agile team.
• Provide technical leadership, drive design reviews, write ADRs, and contribute to hiring and onboarding.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-mortems for AI-powered systems and help define SLOs and error budgets.

Qualifications

• Pragmatic, result-oriented analytical problem-solving skills that can overcome ambiguity.
• Friendly, concise, audience-oriented communication in written and spoken form (English) with effective asynchronous communication.
• Self-organized, purpose-driven individual that likes to collaborate with and enable their team.
• A T-shaped engineer with strong general software engineering and AI skills, paired with deep expertise in at least one area:
• Frontend: Advanced experience with React and TS, building high-quality, user-facing apps.
• Backend: Deep experience designing and operating scalable, event-driven Python systems in cloud-native environments.
• AI: In-depth knowledge of frontier AI models, evaluation, integration into AI-powered product features, and production best practices.
• Strong theoretical understanding and practical experience with current AI model internals.
• Proven experience with AI model deployment & utilization strategies, evaluation methodologies, and monitoring frameworks in production environments.
• Proven experience owning features end-to-end, from technical design to production.
• Strong understanding of how to integrate AI into production systems, including the challenges of non-deterministic behavior.
• Solid understanding and practical application of MLOps and LLMOps best practices for AI applications.
• Familiarity and hands-on experience with major AI service providers and their offerings.
• Working knowledge of fine-tuning methods and their appropriate application.
• Strong software engineering skills with the ability to bridge AI research/concepts and robust, production-ready engineering implementations.
• Experience breaking down complex AI objectives into requirements & actionable tasks.
• Experience leveraging and refining agile practices and processes within an AI/ML team context, including effective requirements, design, and code reviews.
• Proven experience in quickly assessing and adopting new technologies & frameworks.
• Able to implement Clean Architecture & Onion Architecture principles.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native systems, ideally on Google Cloud / Firebase with solid DevOps and MLOps fundamentals, including CI/CD, observability, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Working knowledge of AI safety and security.
• Solid testing discipline across the stack.
• Mentorship and technical leadership experience: growing other engineers, leading design reviews, and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Working knowledge of AI safety and security: OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, prompt injection, data exfiltration risks, content moderation, and PII / GDPR handling.
• Solid testing discipline across the stack - unit, integration, and contract tests for both deterministic code and AI components.
• Experience operating production systems on-call.

Requirements

• Experience in the publishing or media industry.
• Experience with our entire TechStack.
• Experience with MLOps on Vertex AI & Weights and Biases.
• Experience in applied research.
• Experience applying & implementing SRE methodologies.
• Advanced understanding of ML, LLMs, and trends in the AI market.
• Specialized, deep expertise in a relevant area.

Benefits

• The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $160,000.
• This position is classified as remote but is tied to our New York, NY office located at 120 Broadway.
• Employment is subject to New York State tax withholding under applicable regulations.