Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI EngineerCompensation: $200,000 - $300,000 + Equity

Location: New York City, five days per week onsiteWe’re partnering with an AI company building software to help organizations make sense of complex data and support demanding business workflows.

The team is looking for a Staff Applied AI Engineer to shape its model strategy and build production agents. This role combines hands-on engineering, model adaptation, evaluation, and technical leadership.The MissionBuild reliable AI systems that turn fragmented information into useful outputs for customers and internal teams.You’ll work across frontier models, open-weight models, and traditional ML, choosing the right approach for each task and balancing quality, latency, cost, and security.The RoleYou will own key architectural decisions across model adaptation and production agent systems.Working closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, you’ll remain hands-on in the code while setting technical direction, reviewing designs, and mentoring engineers.What You'll DoSelect and benchmark models against practical product requirements.Adapt open-weight models through supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods, and preference optimization.Build agents that use external tools, work with incomplete information, and produce structured outputs.Design infrastructure for orchestration, context management, guardrails, and observability.Turn user feedback and production traces into training data and evaluation cases.Develop evaluation harnesses that measure accuracy, reliability, failure modes, and cost.Improve model serving through batching, quantization, and inference optimization.Strengthen systems against prompt injection, data leakage, and adversarial inputs.What You'll BringSignificant software engineering or applied ML experience, including technical ownership of production systems.Hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs, with clear evidence of how you evaluated and improved performance.Experience shipping production agents used by real customers.Strong Python skills and experience with modern model training and deployment tools.The ability to work across model development, serving, reliability, and production engineering.Experience setting architectural direction and mentoring engineers while remaining hands-on.Strong judgment when working with ambiguous requirements and imperfect data.Experience deploying smaller models, optimizing inference, or building domain-specific evaluations would be valuable.Why Join?Own consequential decisions across model strategy and agent architecture.Take systems from experimentation through production and ongoing improvement.Work on technical challenges that span both applied ML and software engineering.Help establish engineering standards while retaining substantial hands-on ownership.Receive a competitive salary and equity package.About People In AIWe partner with AI-first startups, scale-ups, financial technology companies, and enterprise organizations to connect exceptional technical and product talent with opportunities to build production AI systems, intelligent products, and the next generation of AI-enabled businesses.