Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI Engineer, Office of the CTO | Sunnyvale (Hybrid, 3 days onsite) | $225K–$300K + EquityWe are partnering with a profitable, Series B company in the software-defined vehicle space whose platform is already deployed across approximately 4 million vehicles with leading global automakers.This is a Staff AI Engineer role within the Office of the CTO, focused on taking emerging generative AI capabilities from early prototypes through to production systems deployed at automotive scale. You will have the autonomy and ownership of an early-stage builder, combined with the advantage of working on technology that is already shipping in production.The challenge sits at the intersection of applied AI and systems engineering: building advanced LLM-based systems that are capable, reliable and efficient enough for automotive environments. You will work across the full AI stack, from model adaptation and retrieval systems through to inference optimisation and deployment, owning the journey from first experiment to production capability.This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys solving hard technical problems where cutting-edge AI meets real-world constraints: building powerful models and then making them efficient, robust and practical enough to operate in constrained environments.The RoleAs a Staff AI Engineer, you will:Design and build LLM-powered systems end-to-end, including retrieval pipelines, tool-use architectures, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks and inference infrastructure.Take promising generative AI prototypes and turn them into reliable production capabilities used by global automotive customers.Optimise models for real-world deployment, including latency, memory footprint and compute constraints on edge and embedded hardware.Own AI systems end-to-end, making the hands-on architecture and implementation decisions that balance capability with reliability, efficiency and maintainability.Develop evaluation strategies and engineering practices for building, testing and deploying production AI systems.Work closely with engineering and product leadership to identify, prototype and deliver new AI capabilities from zero to one.About YouYou are a senior AI systems engineer who has personally built and shipped complex AI products, not simply integrated existing APIs. You bring:Strong software engineering fundamentals with deep Python expertise.Experience building and deploying LLM-based systems, including RAG, agentic workflows, fine-tuning or other forms of model adaptation.A track record of owning AI systems end-to-end, from experimentation and evaluation through to production deployment.Experience improving model efficiency through techniques such as quantisation, pruning, distillation, inference optimisation or on-device deployment.The ability to translate cutting-edge AI techniques into reliable production systems.A history of solving ambiguous, zero-to-one technical problems and turning them into production systems.Experience with LoRA, SFT, DPO, RLHF, distillation or embedded AI deployment is highly valued.This role is particularly suited to someone who is hands-on across both applied AI and production engineering: someone who understands modern foundation models but is equally motivated by the systems work required to make them useful at scale.You are based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate for a hybrid role based in Sunnyvale, with approximately three days per week onsite.The team is moving quickly on this hire. If you want to build production AI systems that will directly shape the future of vehicles, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.