Staff AI Engineer

Location: New York
Working model: On-site
Package: $250,000 + Equity + Bonus

About the role

An established, technology-driven organisation is building a central AI engineering capability to support complex, data-intensive decision-making across the business. This is a high-impact individual contributor role for a Senior AI Engineer who enjoys operating close to the commercial core. You'll take ownership of critical AI systems from architecture through to deployment, working within a small, trusted technical group with direct access to senior stakeholders. The environment suits someone who thrives in low-bureaucracy, high-autonomy settings, where AI is expected to deliver real, measurable value, not experiments for experimentation's sake.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building LLM-based applications, including retrieval-augmented generation and agent-style workflows
• Owning end-to-end system architecture, performance, and scalability
• Developing AI tools to support research, monitoring, knowledge discovery, and decision support
• Establishing evaluation and quality frameworks to ensure AI outputs meet high reliability standards
• Reviewing code, setting engineering standards, and supporting the development of other engineers
• Partnering closely with non-technical users to translate complex workflows into intuitive AI products
• Assessing third-party tooling and platforms where appropriate

This is a deeply hands-on role with real ownership.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background (Python preferred)
• Proven experience building production AI systems, particularly modern LLM applications
• Solid understanding of:
  • Prompt design and iteration
  • Embedding pipelines and vector databases
  • RAG architectures and tool-use patterns
  • Model evaluation and monitoring
• Experience deploying AI products used by non-technical stakeholders
• Comfortable setting technical direction while remaining a builder

Nice to have

• Exposure to complex analytical or commercial domains
• Experience working in small, senior engineering teams
• Background in cloud-native environments

Benefits

• Ownership of mission-critical AI systems
• Direct visibility of impact, your work will be used day-to-day
• Modern AI stack with freedom to make technical decisions
• Long-term scope to shape and grow the AI engineering function