Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI Engineer

Location: Milwaukee, WI / Raleigh, NC – Hybrid

Contract: 1+ Year

Work Authorization: USC Only

Read on to find out what you will need to succeed in this position, including skills, qualifications, and experience.

Required Qualifications

• Proven experience personally building and deploying AI systems into production from scratch
• Strong hands-on experience with LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, embeddings, AI agents, and modern AI application architectures
• Experience with model selection, model APIs, prompt engineering, retrieval strategies, agentic workflows, and AI system integration.
• Strong experience with Python and SQL

Technical Environment

The team works across a broad modern technology stack, including:

Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, React, C#, iOS, LLMs, Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, Embeddings, Model APIs, Cloud Platforms, AI Evaluation, Observability, and Production AI Systems.

Candidates are not expected to have experience with every technology listed . Strong software engineering fundamentals, deep AI application experience, architecture ownership, and demonstrated production experience are more important than knowledge of every individual technology.

Staff-Level Expectations

At the Staff level, the successful candidate will be expected to:

• Own architecture across a product or technical domain.
• Make high-impact technical decisions and communicate tradeoffs effectively.
• Establish reusable AI engineering patterns that can be adopted by other teams.
• Raise the technical quality and judgment of the broader engineering organization.
• Balance hands-on implementation with technical leadership and mentorship.
• Take ownership from problem discovery through architecture, implementation, production deployment, evaluation, and iteration

Location & Work Arrangement

• Milwaukee, WI: Preferred location, with approximately 2–3 days/week onsite.
• Raleigh, NC: Hybrid candidates considered.
• Chicagoland: Candidates who can travel to Milwaukee approximately 2 days/week may also be considered.
• Hybrid requirements are flexible for an exceptionally strong candidate with the required AI and architecture background.

Interview Process

Approximately 3 rounds , beginning with two back-to-back 30-minute technical discussions , followed by a potential final round.

The interview process will focus on:

• AI system architecture
• Production AI engineering
• LLM/RAG/agentic AI experience
• Software engineering fundamentals
• Technical decision-making and tradeoffs
• Customer/product judgment
• Architecture ownership and technical leadership

Important Candidate Requirement

Candidates must demonstrate real, hands-on ownership of production AI systems . xhyhwjd Experience limited primarily to AI integrations, experimentation, demonstrations, or POCs will not be sufficient for this Staff-level position.