Staff Engineer / AI Builder - Mountain View
About The Position
Robots & Pencils is hiring a Staff AI Builder to lead the design and delivery of AI/ML systems. This role provides technical leadership on a cross-functional team, defining AI architecture, leading model development and optimization, and solving integration challenges. The engineer will join active projects where reliability, security, and scalability are critical, establish engineering standards, and contribute to technical decisions that shape the future of the company’s AI work. The role focuses on building production-ready AI systems for human workflows and enterprise operations, with the company describing a delivery pace of 30 to 45 days. The position combines agentic and generative AI engineering with full-stack and platform engineering. Work includes designing agentic workflows and RAG pipelines; integrating AWS Bedrock and Agent Core; building evaluation, observability, and reliability mechanisms into AI systems; and developing backend services and event-driven architectures. The engineer also contributes to frontend integration, deployment, monitoring, and production troubleshooting. The Staff Engineer partners with product, design, and delivery leads across global teams, provides technical judgment in architecture discussions, mentors engineers, and owns assigned features and releases end-to-end, including debugging and hardening production systems.
Requirements
- At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful experience shipping GenAI/LLM-powered systems in production.
- Hands-on depth in agentic AI, including reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and multi-agent orchestration, with a considered perspective on single-agent versus multi-agent design.
- Practical RAG expertise, including chunking strategies, embeddings, vector databases such as OpenSearch or similar, cosine similarity search, and re-ranking.
- Experience building evaluation and observability for LLM systems, including golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, RAGAS or comparable metrics, and tracing tools such as LangFuse or LangSmith.
- Strong prompt engineering skills, including the ability to write structured production system prompts with real constraints.
- Hands-on experience with AWS GenAI and cloud services: Bedrock, Agent Core, Lambda, DynamoDB single-table design, S3, SQS, EventBridge, and Step Functions.
- Strong Python and Node.js skills, with experience building full-stack applications and RESTful APIs.
- Understanding of production reliability patterns for LLM-backed systems, including retries/backoff, circuit breakers, and fallback models.
- Experience with containerization using Docker and cloud-native deployment.
- Ability to own ambiguous, integration-heavy problems and explain technical decisions in depth.
Nice To Haves
- Direct experience with Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, including agent registration, MCP tool wiring, memory/session management, and gateway provisioning.
- Experience in a regulated or high-stakes domain such as education, healthcare, or financial services.
- Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools such as Step Functions, Sequencer, or similar state-machine-based systems.
- A perspective on LLM observability tools based on running them in production.
Responsibilities
- Design and build agentic workflows, including reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and single- or multi-agent orchestration.
- Build and maintain RAG pipelines, including chunking, embeddings, vector search, re-ranking, and knowledge-source refresh handling.
- Integrate with AWS Bedrock and Agent Core, including designing MCP-based tools.
- Write and iterate on production system prompts with structured roles, output constraints, and few-shot examples.
- Build evaluation and observability into agents using golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, RAGAS-style metrics, and tracing tools or equivalents.
- Design for LLM failures using retries, backoff and jitter, circuit breakers, fallback models, and user-facing degradation handling.
- Build backend services in Python and Node.js, including serverless architectures using AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
- Design DynamoDB single-table schemas for conversation state, agent memory, and session history.
- Support event-driven orchestration with Step Functions, SQS, and EventBridge.
- Contribute to frontend integration and write clean, well-tested code across the stack.
- Support deployment, monitoring, and production troubleshooting in cloud-native environments using AWS and Docker.
- Bring informed technical judgment to architecture discussions and articulate trade-offs between competing approaches.
- Partner with product, design, and delivery leads across global teams to scope and ship features end-to-end.
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on agentic engineering practices, including use of AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code.
- Own assigned features and releases end-to-end, including debugging, hardening, and maintaining production trustworthiness.
Benefits
- Paid time off.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for eligible employees.
- 401(k) for eligible employees.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
