Staff AI Cloud Engineer

About the role

We are hiring a hands-on technical leader to raise the engineering bar across our teams. You will partner with Engineering Managers and senior engineers to improve architecture, technical design, code reviews, CI/CD, infrastructure, and engineering practices. You will also remain an active individual contributor, shipping production code and leading technically complex initiatives. This is not a traditional architect role focused on diagrams and approvals. You will build systems, create practical engineering guardrails, and help teams make better technical decisions without becoming a bottleneck.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve architecture and engineering practices across multiple teams.
• Partner with Engineering Managers and technical leads on complex system-design decisions.
• Lead technical designs, RFCs, architecture reviews, and critical code reviews.
• Build and ship production systems across AI, backend, cloud, infrastructure, and full-stack applications.
• Improve CI/CD, testing, observability, reliability, security, and developer experience.
• Create reusable platforms, libraries, reference implementations, and paved roads for teams.
• Help design and operate production AI systems, including model integration, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Contribute to cloud infrastructure and help resolve complex production issues.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical quality through hands-on leadership.
• Ensure engineering standards remain effective after they are introduced.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in architecture.
• Founding Engineer experienced with scaling startups.
• Ability to influence multiple teams without relying on formal authority.
• Resourceful and independent to own and operate across teams and individual projects.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Deep expertise in AI systems, backend or distributed systems, infrastructure and cloud architecture.
• Practical understanding of modern AI systems, including foundation models, inference, retrieval, orchestration, evaluation, latency, and cost.
• Strong working knowledge of full-stack development.
• Experience with Python, Go, TypeScript, Kubernetes, and major cloud platforms.

What success looks like

• Lead the engineering transformation to turn ad-hoc features into scaled robust systems.
• Set up practices for Release Lifecycle.
• Improve the quality and consistency of technical design across teams.
• Establish engineering guardrails that teams actually use.
• Reduce repeated architectural mistakes and unnecessary duplication.
• Improve developer velocity, reliability, and operational quality.
• Become a trusted technical partner to Engineering Managers and senior engineers.

Pay

The annual gross base salary range for this position is $180,000 - $225,000 plus variable compensation.