Senior AI Engineer

The Role

You're a technical leader who shapes how Blank Metal approaches AI engineering. With experience designing, building, and shipping AI features that hold up under real-world use, you combine deep technical expertise with mentorship and vision. You architect complex AI systems, make critical technical decisions, and elevate the entire team's capabilities.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical architecture and strategy for AI-powered projects
• Design scalable, production-grade systems that handle real-world complexity
• Make critical decisions about tooling, frameworks, and architectural patterns
• Own the quality and reliability of systems in production
• Mentor and develop other engineers
• Drive technical discussions and shape team standards
• Keep up with emerging tools and techniques
• Build observability and evaluation frameworks
• Partner with product and client teams to translate business needs into technical solutions
• Contribute to longer-term technical vision and innovation

What We're Looking For

• AI Architecture Expertise: Deep understanding of production AI systems design, scalability, and reliability
• Production AI Leadership: Extensive hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating AI systems
• System Design Mastery: Can architect complex AI integrations that scale, handle edge cases, and provide excellent observability
• AI Tooling Depth: Expert knowledge of LLM APIs, vector databases, prompt engineering, agents, and emerging AI tools
• Full-Stack Fluency: Advanced development skills across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
• AI Observability & Evals: Experience building evaluation frameworks and monitoring for AI systems
• Technical Leadership: You mentor others, set technical standards, and drive architectural decisions
• Strategic Thinking: You connect technical decisions to business outcomes
• Learning Mindset: You stay current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape

Required Experience

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated ability to deliver production-ready AI features that real users depend on
• Proven record of shipping complex, mission-critical software
• Strong full-stack and/or backend development skills applied to real projects
• Experience designing and leading technically challenging work from concept through delivery
• Showed ability to guide others, share knowledge, and influence technical direction

Nice to Have

• Experience building RAG systems at scale
• Deep experience with vector databases and semantic search
• Experience with AI observability, evaluation frameworks, or monitoring
• Background in agent-based architectures and agentic AI systems
• Understanding of inference optimization and model serving
• Previous mentorship or technical leadership roles
• Contribution to AI-focused open source projects

Why You'll Love It

• Build AI that ships: every project ends in a live deployment, not a slide deck
• Craft meets velocity: we obsess over quality while delivering at startup speed
• Outcome-driven model: our projects align with client success, not billable hours
• AI-native culture: you'll work with peers who deeply understand modern AI's potential and limits
• Real collaboration: open conversations, shared ownership, and space to bring your voice and creativity

Equal Opportunity

We welcome all backgrounds and perspectives. Diversity makes our work better and our team stronger.