Staff AI Developer

Location: Remote in Canada

Salary: CAD 170,000–234,000 per year

Company

Robots & Pencils designs and delivers production-ready AI systems for enterprise operations and real-world workflows.

What you will do

• Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex AI/ML systems from research through production at scale.
• Build and evolve 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 shape AI strategy and communicate technical tradeoffs.
• Lead design reviews, technical discussions, and high-stakes ambiguous work with ownership of reliability, cost, and safety.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, code reviews, and pairing.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, including 4+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production.
• Deep hands-on experience with generative AI development and complex agentic systems in production.
• Expert software development experience with Python or a similar language, with strong design skills for scalable and maintainable systems.
• Deep cloud platform expertise, including AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings.
• Mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM applications.
• Deep understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
• Extensive RAG pipeline experience, including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, and advanced retrieval.
• API design experience integrating internal and third-party services at scale; advanced cost optimization knowledge covering token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization.
• Strong working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes, plus expert day-to-day use of Claude Code and Cursor.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work in Canada.
• Production AI is delivered on a 30–45-day timeline.
• Work emphasizes engineering craft, ownership, reliability, security, scalability, and measurable client impact.