Staff AI Product Engineer

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

Base salary: $220,000–$330,000 USD per year, with 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.
• Define platform patterns, provisioning contracts, dependency ordering, versioning, and compatibility policies.
• Coach Senior AI Product Engineers and influence technical strategy with product leadership and engineering managers.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions and represent product engineering in architecture reviews.

Requirements

• 8–12 years of software engineering experience and experience setting technical direction across teams.
• 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.
• Experience building developer-facing platforms, provisioning contracts, dependency-ordered service composition, and self-service deployment workflows.
• Production ownership at scale, including on-call responsibility, SLOs, error budgets, incident reviews, and systemic reliability improvements.
• Ability to influence without formal authority and establish durable technical standards across an organization.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Culture centered on innovation, ownership, accountability, transparency, collaboration, adaptability, and resilience.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible paid time off and parental leave.
• Retirement plan participation.