Staff Software Engineer (New York)

Staff Software Engineer $235,000–$285,000 base + equity New York City (onsite) We're partnering with a fast-growing, venture-backed AI startup building intelligent systems to transform complex, data-intensive investigations. With strong commercial traction, growing enterprise adoption, and significant technical challenges ahead, the company is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of production AI agents and model adaptation systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with ownership across LLM fine-tuning, agent architecture, evaluation, and inference infrastructure. What You'll Do Own model strategy, balancing frontier and open-weight LLMs across accuracy, latency, and cost. Fine-tune and adapt open-weight models using LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, and preference optimization. Design and deploy production AI agents with tool use, orchestration, and structured outputs. Build evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, reliability, and hallucinations. Turn real-world user feedback and production traces into training data and continuous model improvements. Optimize model serving, inference performance, batching, and quantization. Drive technical architecture, mentor engineers, and remain hands-on in code. What You'll Bring Strong background in applied AI, machine learning, or software engineering. Proven experience fine-tuning LLMs and deploying adapted models in production. Experience building production-grade AI agents and evaluation pipelines. Strong Python and PyTorch skills. Familiarity with Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, or similar frameworks. Understanding of LLM inference, model serving, observability, and cost optimization. Ability to lead technical decisions and solve ambiguous engineering challenges. Tech Stack Python, PyTorch Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, preference optimization LLM agents, tool calling, orchestration Model serving, quantization, inference optimization LLM evaluation, observability, and guardrails Why Join? Own the technical direction of AI agents and model adaptation at a growing startup. Work on challenging, real-world AI problems with proprietary data and direct customer feedback. Build and deploy sophisticated AI systems beyond proof-of-concept. Join a venture-backed, high-performing engineering team with strong commercial momentum. Receive meaningful equity and have a direct impact on product and company growth. About People In AI People In AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI and Machine Learning talent with companies building the next generation of intelligent technology. Interested? Get in touch to learn more. People In AI