Sr. Software Engineer (AI, ML, Python, LLM, Langchain) - Locals Only - Job#3619664

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Pave Talent is recruiting on behalf of a commercial-stage autonomous mobility company making the leap from R&D into live service. The AI systems you build here won't be demos or internal tools. They'll power a fleet in the real world, interacting with real customers, in real time.

This is a contract role paying $97 to $102 per hour, on-site five days a week at Foster City CA through June 2026, with strong conversion potential as the company scales.

- You've shipped AI agents or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems into production and have the scars to prove it

- You think in systems: embeddings, vector stores, prompt chains, model evaluation, latency trade-offs

- You're energized by ambiguity. This company is scaling fast and the roadmap evolves quickly

- You want to be in the room where architecture decisions get made, not handed a spec to implement

- You're comfortable owning reliability and performance, not just handing off to DevOps

This role is NOT a good fit if you prefer a fully defined backlog, a slow enterprise release cycle, or want to stay in research without shipping.

You'll join a cross-functional engineering team at the exact moment the company transitions from building to operating. The AI work here spans the full stack of what modern applied AI looks like: autonomous decision-making agents, conversational interfaces for customer service, RAG pipelines that pull from live operational data, and large language model (LLM) deployments balanced for cost, latency, and accuracy in a real fleet environment.

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- Design and deploy AI agents and autonomous systems capable of multi-step task execution and real-time decision-making

- Build conversational AI solutions including chatbots and voice-based customer service systems integrated into fleet operations

- Develop and optimize RAG systems: vector databases, embedding strategies, retrieval pipelines, and prompt engineering

- Implement and tune machine learning models using PyTorch, balancing accuracy, latency, and cost for production use

- Evaluate and deploy LLMs from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta based on application-specific requirements

- Build AI-powered integrations across services using REST APIs, gRPC, or event-driven architectures (Kafka)

- Architect production-grade AI systems with reliability, observability, and scalability built in from the start

- Collaborate with product, data, and platform teams to translate commercial requirements into technical solutions

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- 6+ years of Python development with a focus on AI or machine learning applications

- Hands-on production experience with PyTorch: model training, fine-tuning, or deployment

- Direct experience building or operating RAG systems: vector databases, embeddings, retrieval strategies, and prompt engineering

- Familiarity with AI agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar)

- Working knowledge of transformer architecture and attention mechanisms

- Experience integrating AI capabilities into applications via REST APIs, gRPC, or Kafka

- Ability to work on-site in San Diego five days per week

:

- Proficiency in Kotlin and full-stack development experience

- Cloud deployment experience on AWS, GCP, or Azure, especially microservices

- Containerization and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes

- CI/CD pipeline experience and DevOps practices in an AI systems context

- Prior experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or mobility tech

: $97 to $102 per hour

: Monday through Friday, standard business hours

: On-site, Foster City CA

: Contract through June 30, 2026

: Not guaranteed per this listing, but the company is in active growth mode

Apply via LinkedIn and we'll reach out to schedule a conversation. Confidential search; your application is fully private.

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