Staff AI Engineer, R&D Lead for Production LLMs

Dlocal LLP; Madrid; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible schedule

Fintech environment

Referral bonus program

Work from anywhere

Job summary

dLocal is seeking a Staff Engineer in AI R&D to set the technical direction for agentic and LLM-based systems, elevate engineering standards, and tackle high‑impact production challenges. You will join an AI R&D team aligned to the company’s urgent needs and collaborate across teams and business units.

You will lead major initiatives, shape architecture, guide execution from design to production, and maintain close alignment with engineering peers and stakeholders for fast, informed decisions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience at senior or Staff level.
• 2+ years building and operating systems based on LLMs, ideally in production.
• Experience designing agentic or multi-step AI systems involving tool use, orchestration, state, retrieval or external integrations.
• Strong foundations in distributed systems, including software architecture principles.
• Solid knowledge of cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, and running services securely and cost-consciously.
• Experience in observability, testing and evaluation of complex systems.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical lead of AI initiatives, from problem definition through delivery in production.
• Work with peers and business stakeholders to define scope, priorities, and outcomes.
• Translate business goals into technical plans, milestones and trade-offs.
• Ensure production outcomes are measurable and explainable to the business.
• Lead operational practices for reliability, scalability, resilience, observability and incident learning.

Skills

LLM systems

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Observability & testing

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

LangChain

LangGraph

Claude Agent SDK

Job description

dLocal is seeking a Staff Engineer in AI R&D to set the technical direction for agentic and LLM-based systems, elevate engineering standards, and tackle high‑impact production challenges. You will join an AI R&D team aligned to the company’s urgent needs and collaborate across teams and business units.

You will lead major initiatives, shape architecture, guide execution from design to production, and maintain close alignment with engineering peers and stakeholders for fast, informed decisions.