Staff AI Engineer

Location: Houston, Texas, with onsite work required 50% of the time

Salary: $177,375–$209,625 USD per year

Company

Robots & Pencils designs and delivers production-ready AI systems and digital products for enterprise clients.

What you will do

• Lead end-to-end architecture and implementation of complex AI/ML systems from research through production.
• Build scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and infrastructure for reliable model development and deployment.
• Define AI engineering standards, responsible AI practices, and technical direction across teams.
• Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to align architecture with business outcomes.
• Lead design reviews, communicate AI tradeoffs, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Own ambiguous, high-stakes work while optimizing reliability, safety, and operational cost.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years building production AI/ML systems and generative AI applications.
• Expert software engineering skills with Python or a similar language, plus strong scalable-system design experience.
• Deep AWS expertise, including AWS generative AI services, AI frameworks, and orchestration tools.
• Experience shipping agentic systems, RAG pipelines, APIs, and integrations with internal and third-party services at scale.
• Experience with LLM evaluation, observability, AI safety, responsible AI, prompt-injection defenses, PII handling, and cost optimization.
• Strong Docker and Kubernetes knowledge, with expert day-to-day use of Claude Code and Cursor.

Culture & Benefits

• Production-ready AI systems are delivered on an accelerated 30–45-day cycle.
• Work combines engineering rigor with creativity and a focus on real human workflows.
• Benefits include paid time off, medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Eligible employees receive access to a 401(k) plan.
• Employment may be conditional on successful completion of a background check.