Staff Engineer / AI Builder (AI)

Location: New York, NY; US - Remote

Salary: $165,604–$228,491 USD annually

Company

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

What you will do

• Design and build agentic workflows, reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and single- and multi-agent architectures.
• Build and maintain RAG pipelines covering chunking, embeddings, vector search, re-ranking, and knowledge-source refresh handling.
• Integrate AWS Bedrock, Agent Core, and MCP-based tools; develop production prompts, evaluation datasets, observability, tracing, and runtime guardrails.
• Build Python and Node.js backend services, serverless AWS architectures, DynamoDB single-table schemas, and event-driven workflows with Step Functions, SQS, and EventBridge.
• Support frontend integration, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and production hardening in AWS and Docker environments.
• Lead architecture decisions, mentor engineers, collaborate with product, design, and delivery leads, and own features and releases end-to-end.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful experience shipping GenAI/LLM-powered systems in production.
• Hands-on depth in agentic AI, including reasoning loops, tool/function calling, multi-agent orchestration, and choosing between single- and multi-agent designs.
• Practical RAG expertise with chunking strategies, embeddings, vector databases such as OpenSearch, cosine similarity search, and re-ranking.
• Experience building LLM evaluation and observability with golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, RAGAS or comparable metrics, and LangFuse, LangSmith, or equivalent tracing tools.
• Strong prompt engineering skills, including production system prompts with structured roles, constraints, and few-shot examples.
• Hands-on AWS GenAI experience with Bedrock, Agent Core, Lambda, DynamoDB single-table design, S3, SQS, EventBridge, and Step Functions.
• Strong Python and Node.js skills, including full-stack applications and RESTful APIs.
• Understanding of production reliability patterns for LLM-backed systems, including retries with backoff, circuit breakers, and fallback models.
• Experience with Docker, cloud-native deployment, ambiguous integration-heavy problems, and end-to-end technical ownership.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, including agent registration, MCP tool wiring, memory/session management, and gateway provisioning.
• Experience in regulated or high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, or financial services.
• Familiarity with Step Functions, Sequencer, or similar state-machine-based workflow orchestration tools.
• Practical experience operating LLM observability tooling in production.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on cross-functional teams delivering production-ready AI systems in 30–45 days.
• Emphasis on engineering paired with creativity, technical judgment, ownership, and trustworthy production systems.
• Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus 401(k) for eligible employees.
• Employment may be conditional on a background check in accordance with local legislation.