Principal Data Scientist (Agentic AI Technical Lead)

Location: CA Remote

Company

Robots & Pencils designs and delivers production-ready AI systems and digital products for enterprise clients, combining engineering with creative problem-solving.

What you will do

• Provide technical oversight for agentic AI workstreams from problem framing and architecture through evaluation, deployment, and ongoing operation.
• Define reference architecture and technical standards for multi-agent orchestration, tool and function calling, RAG, vector databases, embeddings, and streaming responses.
• Coordinate delivery across teams by managing dependencies, resolving technical blockers, and maintaining quality and velocity.
• Establish model development, experimentation, and evaluation practices covering quality, safety, hallucination, cost, and latency.
• Guide scalable ML platforms, event-driven workflows, observability, monitoring, security, and production reliability.
• Partner with executives and senior client stakeholders on the AI roadmap, technical tradeoffs, communication, and high-stakes decisions.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in data science and AI/ML, including taking AI systems from research to enterprise-scale production.
• Experience leading technical delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams or large multi-team programs.
• Hands-on experience with LLM and agentic systems, including prompt engineering, function and tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings, and streaming responses.
• Strong proficiency in Python, modern data science and ML tools, MLOps, AI infrastructure, model versioning, monitoring, deployment automation, and reproducibility.
• Experience with software and distributed systems engineering, API design, unit testing, event-driven architectures, workflow orchestration, and SQL and NoSQL databases.
• In-depth AWS experience, especially Amazon Bedrock and other AWS generative AI capabilities, plus knowledge of AI governance, responsible AI, and production compliance.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated industries such as life sciences, healthcare, or financial services.
• Consulting or client-facing technical leadership experience.
• Experience with fine-tuning, evaluation automation, agent safety, or guardrails.

Culture & Benefits

• Production-ready AI systems are delivered on a 30–45 day cadence.
• Work emphasizes ownership, direct feedback, technical craft, and measurable client impact.
• Collaboration spans data science, engineering, product, business, executive, and client teams.
• Teams average more than fifteen years of experience and value continuous learning and practical problem-solving.