Staff ML Engineer

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San Francisco / $250000 - $350000 annum

INFO

Salary

SALARY:

$250000 - $350000

Location

LOCATION

San Francisco

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

Staff / Principal AI/ML Engineer

Location: San Mateo, CA - Hybrid, 2-3 days/week
Remote: Exceptional remote candidates may be considered
Compensation: $250,000-$350,000 base + equity
Level: Mid-Level through Principal, based on experience

The Opportunity

We're partnering with a fast-growing enterprise AI company building the next generation of AI-powered data engineering and analytics technology.

The company is developing production AI agents that allow enterprise users to interact with complex data through natural language. Rather than manually building data transformations and pipelines, users can describe what they need and AI agents generate, modify, validate, and deploy production-ready workflows.

They're expanding a small, highly technical AI engineering organization and are looking for engineers who want significant ownership over how these systems are designed and built.

This is not a research or proof-of-concept environment. The systems you build will ship directly into a customer-facing enterprise product.

What You'll Own

You'll work across the intelligence layer of the platform, including:

  • Architecting multi-step AI agents from design through production
  • Building retrieval and knowledge systems that allow agents to reason over complex enterprise data
  • Developing RAG pipelines, vector search, semantic retrieval, and knowledge graph capabilities
  • Building AI systems capable of generating and modifying production-quality code and data transformations
  • Designing evaluation frameworks to measure agent quality, reliability, and performance
  • Making decisions around model selection, prompting, fine-tuning, and build-vs-buy
  • Solving production challenges involving latency, throughput, scalability, reliability, and observability
  • Taking large, ambiguous technical problems from initial concept through deployment
  • Helping establish architecture and engineering standards as the AI organization continues to grow

What We're Looking For

We're looking for engineers who have built real AI products-not just experiments.

Strong candidates will have:

  • Experience building and deploying AI agents or sophisticated LLM-powered systems into production
  • Strong software and backend engineering fundamentals
  • Advanced Python experience
  • Experience with RAG and retrieval architectures
  • Experience with vector databases, semantic search, or knowledge graphs
  • Experience designing evaluation systems for production AI
  • A track record of owning technically complex projects from architecture through deployment
  • Experience operating and supporting production systems
  • The ability to make architectural decisions in ambiguous, rapidly changing environments
  • A strong product mindset and desire to build customer-facing technology

Particularly Valuable Experience

Experience with any of the following would be beneficial:

  • Coding agents or code-generation systems
  • Knowledge graphs / Neo4j
  • Vector databases
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Go
  • Scala
  • Java
  • Databricks
  • Snowflake
  • BigQuery
  • Spark
  • DuckDB
  • Large-scale data processing or analytics platforms

Who Will Do Well Here

You'll likely thrive in this environment if you're a hands-on builder who enjoys solving problems without a predefined roadmap.

The team moves quickly and expects engineers to challenge assumptions, experiment with new approaches, discard ideas that aren't working, and continuously rethink architecture as AI technology evolves.

This role is particularly well suited for someone who wants substantial technical ownership and the opportunity to influence how production AI agents are built at the platform level.

Compensation

Base Salary: $250,000-$350,000, depending on level and experience

Equity: Stock options with a four-year vesting schedule and one-year cliff

The company also provides comprehensive health benefits, flexible PTO, professional development support, and additional wellness benefits.

CONTACT

Kyle Arriola

Associate Vice President

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