Staff AI Product Engineer

Location: Houston, New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, United States

Salary: $220,000–$293,333 USD per year, plus potential bonus, equity, and/or commission programs.

Company

Nscale is building a vertically integrated GenAI cloud platform spanning data centers, software, and AI applications.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for the AI product platform across 2–4 teams.
• Drive architectural decisions covering service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and platform standards.
• Lead systemic improvements in performance, reliability, cost efficiency, and developer experience.
• Resolve ambiguous system-level problems and make build-versus-buy decisions for platform capabilities.
• Coach Senior AI Product Engineers and raise technical capability across teams.
• Partner with product leadership and engineering managers on technical strategy and represent product engineering in architecture reviews.

Requirements

• 8–12 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience setting technical direction across teams and establishing architectural patterns and durable technical standards.
• Deep expertise in API design, platform engineering, and large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience designing cloud services with control plane/data plane separation and cell-based architecture for scalability and blast-radius isolation.
• Experience building and operating developer-facing platforms, including provisioning contracts, dependency-ordered service composition, versioning, and compatibility policies.
• Hands-on production ownership at scale, including on-call responsibility, SLO and error-budget practices, systemic incident fixes, cost attribution, and predictable scaling guardrails.

Nice to have

• Experience with SDK and Terraform provider strategies, plugin systems, API versioning, or client library design.
• Experience building AI/ML product platforms, including inference APIs, fine-tuning user experiences, model management, or evaluation tooling.
• Experience with self-service onboarding, GPU cloud or compute platforms, and ML workloads under strict SLAs.

Culture & Benefits

• Culture centered on innovation, ownership, accountability, openness, and transparency.
• Benefits may include medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible paid time off and parental leave.
• Retirement plan participation and potential bonus, equity, and/or commission programs.