Staff AI Engineer
$210k-$280k
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Posted yesterday
SENIORITY
Lead
SALARY
$210k-$280k
About the role
- Design and build LLM applications: RAG pipelines, agents, tool-use systems, structured generation, multi-step workflows
- Own prompt engineering and evaluation — write evals before you write prompts, and treat both as code
- Integrate foundation models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-weight Llama/Qwen/Mistral) and know when to reach for which
- Build the unglamorous infrastructure that makes LLMs production-grade: caching, streaming, retries, fallbacks, cost controls, observability, guardrails
- Fine-tune or distill models when prompting hits a wall (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, DPO)
- Partner with product and design on UX patterns specific to AI (latency masking, streaming UIs, confidence display, human-in-the-loop)
- 3+ years of software engineering, with at least 1 year shipping LLM-based features in production
- Strong Python and TypeScript; comfortable in a real codebase, not just notebooks
- Deep practical knowledge of the LLM stack: prompting techniques, function calling, structured outputs, context management, embedding models, vector search
- Have built and maintained an eval suite — and have opinions on why most public benchmarks are misleading
- Comfortable with at least one orchestration approach (custom, LangGraph, Inngest, Temporal) and one vector store (pgvector, Pinecone, Turbopuffer, Weaviate)
- Cost- and latency-aware: can read a token bill and a trace and know where to cut
- Clear communicator who can push back when "just add AI" isn't the right answer
- Experience with agent frameworks and MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Fine-tuning experience on open-weight models, or work with inference servers like vLLM/TGI/SGLangBackground in security, evals, or red-teaming for LLM systems
- Contributions to open-source AI tooling
- Work from anywhere in the US! Machinify is digital-first.
- Top Medical/Dental/Vision offeringsFSA/HSATuition reimbursement
- Competitive salary, 401(k) with company match
- Unlimited PTOAdditional health and wellness benefits and perks
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
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Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.
