Staff Engineer, AI Labs

Via•New York, NY

3d•$200,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Via is launching AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating like a startup within the company, to expand its reach and provide cutting-edge technical solutions to cities in areas beyond transit. As a founding member of AI Labs, you will have the opportunity to build AI-powered products that could fundamentally change how Via and its partner cities operate. This role offers autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company at scale, without the usual constraints. The ideal candidate has experience building AI products end-to-end and is energized by working with a blank canvas.

Requirements

10+ years of hands-on experience building full stack applications with a track record of owning features end-to-end.
3+ years of working with AI tools and/or building AI powered products.
Deep expertise across the AI stack, including LLMs, predictive modelling, and the data infrastructure required to support them in real-world environments.
Strong engineering skills, comfortable designing scalable APIs, working with distributed systems, and writing clean, maintainable code.
Comfortable with ambiguity and early-stage environments; ability to take ownership without being asked.
Strong communication skills for cross-functional collaboration.
Intellectual curiosity to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI.
Thrive when working directly with users and customers.
Comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site.

Responsibilities

Build and ship production-grade AI products end-to-end, owning everything from problem framing and data pipeline design through to deployment and iteration in live environments.
Work closely with partners in a forward-deployed manner to deeply understand problems and constraints and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions.
Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve challenging local problems with agentic workflows.
Contribute to intelligent tooling involving data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences across a fast-moving and varied roadmap.
Collaborate directly with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities across the business.
Write clean, scalable backend code that powers AI-driven features, designing APIs, managing data flows, and ensuring systems perform reliably at scale.
Help shape the technical culture of AI Labs from the ground up, contributing to how the team builds, reviews, ships, and iterates.
Stay close to the frontier of AI development and proactively bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team.