Senior AI Developer

Location: Remote in the United States

Salary: $139,750–$188,125 USD per year

Company

Robots & Pencils designs and delivers production AI systems and digital products for enterprise clients, combining engineering with creativity.

What you will do

• Design, implement, optimize, and deploy AI/ML models end-to-end, including data pipelines and training workflows.
• Maintain production AI systems, monitor model drift, debug issues, and improve reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Build and ship agentic systems, RAG pipelines, APIs, and integrations with internal and third-party services.
• Contribute to AI architecture decisions, code reviews, design discussions, and engineering practice improvements.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and data teams and translate technical tradeoffs for non-specialists.
• Own meaningful work through production delivery and support more junior engineers when opportunities arise.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with generative AI development and proven ability to design and ship agentic systems.
• Strong software engineering background with Python or a similar language.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms, preferably in-depth knowledge of AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings.
• Experience with AI frameworks, orchestration tools, evaluation frameworks, and observability tools for LLM applications.
• Understanding of AI safety, responsible AI, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
• Hands-on RAG experience, including chunking strategies, embedding models, and vector databases.
• API development experience, including designing and integrating internal and third-party services.
• Cost optimization expertise covering token economics, caching, model routing, and quantization; working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes.
• Demonstrable day-to-day use and knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor, plus strong problem-solving and judgment in ambiguous technical situations.

Culture & Benefits

• Production-ready AI systems are shipped in 30 to 45 days.
• Work emphasizes ownership, craft, direct feedback, continuous learning, and practical execution under constraints.
• Collaborate with experienced teams averaging more than fifteen years of experience.
• Remote work is available for the United States.