[Remote] Principal AI Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Robots & Pencils is a company focused on designing AI systems for a human world. They are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to define and drive the technical direction of AI/ML systems, leading complex system design and implementation challenges while partnering with leadership to shape the AI roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Define AI architecture and technical strategy, and lead implementation across the full lifecycle from design through production
• Build scalable ML platforms, pipelines, and workflow orchestration that support model development and event-driven, asynchronous operations at scale (e.g., SQS, EventBridge)
• Architect and build LLM-powered systems, including prompt engineering, function/tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, RAG patterns, vector databases, embeddings, and streaming responses
• Design and develop APIs and backend services that integrate AI capabilities with enterprise systems and third-party platforms
• Lead model development, optimization, and the path from research to production, ensuring promising approaches translate into reliable, production-ready systems
• Ensure AI reliability, security, and scalability across deployed systems, including logging, monitoring, and debugging in production environments
• Bring an AI-forward mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude, Cursor, and other modern AI assistants to ship higher-quality work at pace
• Co-define the AI roadmap with leadership, operating as a peer in strategic technical conversations
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders alike, translating depth into decisions others can act on
• Engage with product, engineering, and data teams to align AI work with broader business priorities
• Define and champion AI engineering standards that shape how the organization builds and operates AI systems
• Mentor across the organization, shaping engineering culture and developing the next generation of technical leaders
• Own high-stakes architectural decisions that carry significant organizational and cross-engagement weight
• Drive technical vision — defining not just what gets built, but how AI engineering evolves at R&P over time

Skills

• 7+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering
• Strong proficiency in Python
• Strong software engineering background, including system design, API design, code quality, and strong unit testing practices
• Experience designing and working with distributed systems and event-driven architectures
• Expertise in MLOps and AI infrastructure, including model versioning, monitoring, deployment automation, and reproducibility
• Experience with Amazon Quick, ServiceNow integration, Jira integration, AWS Bedrock, Agentic AI/ML (prompt engineering, agent development), Natural language querying / analytics
• Strong stakeholder communication skills, with the ability to translate technical depth across audiences
• In-depth experience with AWS, especially AWS GenAI offering; working knowledge of other cloud platforms
• Familiarity with both SQL and NoSQL databases, including scalable design patterns
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools and asynchronous system operations
• Hands-on experience with LLM systems, including prompt engineering, function/tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings, and streaming LLM responses
• Experience with containerization (e.g., Docker) and cloud-native AI architecture patterns
• Exposure to AI governance and compliance considerations in production environments

Company Overview

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