Staff & Principal AI/ML Engineer

Title: Staff & Principal AI/ML EngineerLocation: Bay Area (Hybrid)Compensation: Up to $380,000 + EquityWe're partnered with a well-funded, high-growth Series B startup building the next generation of AI-native data infrastructure for Fortune 500 enterprises. With 3.5x revenue growth in FY'24 and 160% net revenue retention, they're scaling fast and investing in senior technical leadership to define how AI gets built across the company.This is a role for someone who sets technical direction, not just executes it. You'll shape agent architecture, evaluation strategy, and retrieval systems at the core of the platform, leading large-scale initiatives from design through to production with real ownership over outcomes. The scope is intentionally open-ended, and strong engineers have enormous leverage here.What You'll DoSet technical direction across multi-step agent architecture, RAG pipelines, and knowledge retrieval systems, making the calls on agent design, model selection, and build vs. buyOwn the AI behind the platform's core code generation capability, from prompt design and fine-tuning through to output validation at scaleLead large, complex initiatives end-to-end with minimal direction, defining the problem as much as the solutionShape how production AI gets built across the team, establishing standards for evaluation, observability, and reliabilityInfluence architectural decisions across the broader engineering organisation and mentor engineers at all levelsRequirements8+ years of software engineering experience with significant AI/ML depth and a track record of technical leadershipDemonstrated experience owning and shipping AI agents or coding agents in production at scaleStrong Python skills with deep hands-on experience across RAG, vector databases, and knowledge graphs (Neo4j)Ability to make architectural decisions under uncertainty and drive them through to productionExperience with AWS and Kubernetes, and comfort operating across the full AI development lifecycleExperience with data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, or Spark is a strong plusScala or Go experience is a bonusIf you're a technical leader who defines problems as much as you solve them, thrives in ambiguity, and wants to shape how AI is built at a company scaling toward its next funding round, this is the opportunity.