Software Engineer, Artificial Intelligence/LLM (Multiple Seniority Levels)

Beacon AI • San Carlos, CA

12d • $135,000 - $260,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Beacon AI is building an AI platform to enhance aviation safety, efficiency, and capability. We are a fast-moving team backed by top investors, with numerous Department of Defense contracts and partnerships with major airlines. Our culture emphasizes small, focused teams that own their work, ship quickly, and learn rapidly, pushing the boundaries of human-AI collaboration in aviation. This role involves shipping LLM-powered product features end-to-end, including designing retrieval and tool-calling flows, developing services, building evaluations and guardrails, and monitoring production performance (cost, latency, quality). Collaboration with ML/infra teammates on embeddings, indexing, and model hosting, as well as with product teammates on user experience, is key. The company values speed and reliability in a safety-critical domain. Hiring is open across multiple seniority levels, with Senior engineers owning features and services, and Staff engineers owning systems, standards, and cross-team technical direction.

Requirements

• Shipped LLM apps: You’ve put LLM features in front of users and improved them with data.
• Strong builder: Comfortable writing production code, tests, and docs. You keep things simple and observable.
• RAG and tools depth: You understand embeddings, chunking, vector search tradeoffs, and function calling.
• Quality mindset: You design evals, define success metrics, and iterate based on evidence.
• Cost and latency aware: You track p95, hit SLAs, and reduce cost without hurting quality.
• Clear communicator: You explain tradeoffs and align partners across product, infra, and security.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Bedrock, OpenSearch Serverless, pgvector, Pinecone, or Weaviate.
• Prompt versioning, guardrails, and provider routing in production.
• Multimodal work with time series or video.
• Familiarity with GPU inference, Triton, or TensorRT-LLM.
• Aviation or other safety-critical domain exposure.
• DevOps basics for CI/CD, IaC, and secure secrets handling.

Responsibilities

• Build user-facing LLM features
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation and tool-calling flows using frameworks like LangChain or equivalent primitives.
• Deliver robust JSON and schema-bound outputs with validation, retries, and fallbacks.
• Add function calling to integrate with internal tools, search, routing, and data services.
• Own the service layer by shipping APIs and workers in Python or TypeScript with clear contracts, streaming, and backoff.
• Add caching, request shaping, prompt templates, and context packing to control latency and cost.
• Integrate with AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, or self-hosted endpoints as needed.
• Collaborate with infrastructure teammates to develop chunking, embeddings, and indexing capabilities for documents, time series, and multimedia.
• Choose and tune vector backends such as OpenSearch, pgvector, or Pinecone.
• Keep knowledge bases fresh with data syncs from S3, Aurora, DynamoDB, and external sources.
• Create offline evals and golden sets for prompts, retrievers, and tools.
• Stand up online metrics for task success, hallucination rate, retrieval precision/recall, p95 latency, and cost per request.
• Run A/B tests and prompt/version rollouts with guardrails and canaries.
• Implement content and policy checks, PII detection and redaction, access controls, and auditing.
• Design human-in-the-loop paths for sensitive actions.
• Handle aviation data with care and follow internal security standards.
• Add tracing, logs, and dashboards for model calls, token usage, errors, and saturation.
• Debug tricky failures across retrieval, prompts, tools, and providers.

Benefits

• Healthcare: 100% of employee medical premiums covered; 25% for dependents
• Time Off: 3 weeks PTO plus 13+ paid company holidays
• 401(k): Offered (no current employer match, but we are committed to enhancing this benefit in the future)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed