Senior AI Developer
About The Position
Robots & Pencils is seeking a senior AI engineer to design, build, and deliver production AI/ML systems. The role involves owning features end-to-end, contributing to architectural decisions, and applying strong technical judgment. The successful candidate will join a cross-functional team working on in-flight projects where reliability, performance, and scalability matter. The role includes designing and implementing models, building data pipelines and training workflows, and deploying systems to production environments. The engineer will enhance existing systems, deliver new capabilities, and help shape how the company’s AI work scales. Robots & Pencils describes its mission as designing AI systems for a human world, pairing engineering with creativity to deliver agents that work for people in real workflows. The company says it ships production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days.
Requirements
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production and hands-on generative AI development.
- Strong software engineering background in Python or a similar language.
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms; AWS knowledge and AWS GenAI experience are preferred.
- Proven ability to design and ship agentic systems.
- Experience with AI frameworks and orchestration tools.
- Experience with evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM applications.
- Understanding of AI safety, responsible AI principles, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
- Hands-on experience building RAG pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding models, and vector databases.
- API development experience, including designing and integrating with internal and third-party services.
- Cost optimization expertise, including token economics, caching strategies, model routing, and quantization.
- Working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
- Demonstrable day-to-day use and knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate ambiguous technical challenges with sound judgment.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and deploy ML/AI models end-to-end, from concept through production, including data pipelines, training workflows, and optimization for performance, accuracy, and efficiency.
- Maintain and evolve AI systems in production by monitoring for drift, debugging issues, and improving reliability and scalability.
- Use AI-forward coding tools such as Claude and Cursor in daily work.
- Partner with product, engineering, and data teams to align AI work with broader product and business goals.
- Translate technical tradeoffs, model behavior, and constraints into terms non-specialists can act on.
- Participate in code reviews and design discussions, raising concerns and offering constructive feedback.
- Contribute to AI architecture decisions, considering tradeoffs and long-term implications.
- Own meaningful work end-to-end, including the work required to get AI into production.
- Support more junior engineers and raise engineering practices through personal contributions.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
