Staff & Principal AI/ML Engineer

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Redwood City, CA / $300000 - $380000 annum

INFO

Salary

SALARY:

$300000 - $380000

Location

LOCATION

Redwood City, CA

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

Title: Staff & Principal AI/ML Engineer

Location: Bay Area (Hybrid)

Compensation: Up to $380,000 + Equity

We'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 Do

  • Set technical direction across multi-step agent architecture, RAG pipelines, and knowledge retrieval systems, making the calls on agent design, model selection, and build vs. buy
  • Own the AI behind the platform's core code generation capability, from prompt design and fine-tuning through to output validation at scale
  • Lead large, complex initiatives end-to-end with minimal direction, defining the problem as much as the solution
  • Shape how production AI gets built across the team, establishing standards for evaluation, observability, and reliability
  • Influence architectural decisions across the broader engineering organisation and mentor engineers at all levels

Requirements

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant AI/ML depth and a track record of technical leadership
  • Demonstrated experience owning and shipping AI agents or coding agents in production at scale
  • Strong 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 production
  • Experience with AWS and Kubernetes, and comfort operating across the full AI development lifecycle
  • Experience with data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, or Spark is a strong plus
  • Scala or Go experience is a bonus

If 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.



CONTACT

George Ethell

Principal Recruitment Consultant

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