Staff AI Architect

Location: US - Remote

Salary: $146,071–$201,541 USD annually

Company

Robots & Pencils designs and delivers production-ready AI systems that integrate into enterprise operations and client workflows.

What you will do

• Define AI system architecture for LLM applications, agentic systems, retrieval, and ML model serving across end-to-end engagements.
• Drive RAG and context-engineering strategy, including hybrid retrieval, reranking, chunking, embeddings, and vector stores.
• Lead multi-agent orchestration using frameworks such as LangGraph, Amazon Bedrock Agents, and AgentCore.
• Own AWS model-serving and inference architecture, optimizing latency, throughput, and cost through streaming, caching, batching, and quantization.
• Establish LLMOps and MLOps standards covering prompt versioning, evaluation pipelines, CI/CD, feature stores, guardrails, and observability.
• Partner with clients and leadership, mentor engineers, document reusable patterns, and act as a technical escalation point for complex architecture and integration challenges.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in AI/ML architecture or technical leadership.
• Deep expertise in LLM and agentic application architecture, multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, production RAG, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and vector stores.
• Strong experience with AWS model serving and inference optimization, as well as LLMOps, MLOps, evaluation, guardrails, tracing, and observability.
• Expert software engineering background with proficiency in Python and at least one additional language such as TypeScript, Java, or Go.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture, including microservices, serverless systems, containerization, and event-driven systems.
• Leadership, mentoring, responsible AI, governance, data isolation, prompt-injection defense, and sound judgment in ambiguous technical and business situations.

Nice to have

• AWS AI certifications.
• Fine-tuning or model customization experience.
• Additional responsible AI experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Production AI is delivered on an accelerated 30–45-day timeline.
• Work emphasizes ownership, direct feedback, technical craft, and continuous learning.
• Teams average more than fifteen years of experience.
• Eligible employees receive paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance, and a 401(k).
• Employment may be conditional on a background check in accordance with local legislation.