Staff AI Engineer

Location: Lviv, Ukraine

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs and ships AI co-workers and enterprise AI systems for clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

• Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex AI and ML systems from research through production.
• Build scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for reliable model development and deployment.
• Define AI architecture, engineering standards, and responsible AI practices.
• Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to align technical direction with business outcomes.
• Lead design reviews, explain AI trade-offs, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Drive ambiguous, high-stakes work through production while managing reliability, cost, security, and safety.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years building AI/ML systems in production.
• Expert software engineering skills with Python or a similar language and strong experience designing scalable, maintainable systems.
• Deep expertise in AWS services and AWS generative AI offerings.
• Experience shipping agentic systems, RAG pipelines, AI frameworks, orchestration tools, evaluation frameworks, and LLM observability capabilities.
• Knowledge of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt-injection defenses, PII handling, API design, model routing, quantization, and token-cost optimization.
• Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes, plus expert daily use of Claude Code and Cursor.

Culture & Benefits

• 20 days of paid vacation and 15 days of unpaid vacation.
• Official public holidays off and 5 paid sick days without a doctor's certificate.
• Medical insurance.
• Military draft deferment and reservation support.
• Cooperation under a gig contract.
• Work with senior, cross-functional teams focused on shipping production-ready AI systems.