Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI Engineer for Robots & Pencils. One opening. Remote US role; start date ASAP. Includes approximately 20% travel for in-person interview and one-week onboarding, expenses covered. Compensation: $130,000-$198,000. Authorization: must be legally authorized to work in the US; no sponsorship.

This is a senior backend/AI engineering role in a mature production AI environment with real enterprise users. The role focuses on Python and Node.js backend engineering, AWS-native serverless architecture, DynamoDB single-table design, and production-grade AI platform engineering: LLM function/tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, vector databases/OpenSearch, RAG, and streaming LLM responses.

Responsibilities include building and maintaining backend services, developing APIs, contributing to full-stack integration, supporting workflow orchestration and event-driven processes, improving reliability, troubleshooting production systems, supporting deployment/release processes, participating in code reviews, mentoring, and taking end-to-end ownership of features.

Requirements

6+ years professional software engineering experience. Strong Python and Node.js experience. Hands-on experience with LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, vector databases/OpenSearch, embeddings, streaming LLM responses, and RAG. AWS cloud experience including Lambda, DynamoDB single-table design, S3, SQS, EventBridge, and Step Functions. Experience building and maintaining full-stack applications, workflow orchestration tools, API design and backend systems, SQL and NoSQL databases, production environments, unit testing, maintainable test strategies, and Docker. Nice to have: Langfuse, synthetic AI testing, token cost optimization, reasoning effort configuration, and Step Functions for AI workflows.