Lead Production AI Systems Architect for LLMs & RAG

Harnham; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham partners with a high-growth SaaS company to redefine enterprise trust via AI. You will shape AI architecture, systems, and long-term direction across LLMs, retrieval, and agent workflows in production.

The role demands owning end-to-end AI systems, building scalable RAG pipelines, and designing robust evaluation frameworks while collaborating with product, platform, and domain teams to deliver reliable and cost-efficient AI at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with leadership in AI/ML.
• Proven track record deploying production LLM systems.
• Strong background in RAG, embeddings, and vector databases.
• Experience designing evaluation systems and using quantitative analysis.
• Strong Python skills and solid software fundamentals.
• Ability to make architectural decisions at scale.
• Deep understanding of production systems, reliability and cost tradeoffs.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and ownership mindset.
• Ability to translate complex requirements into scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and own production AI systems end-to-end (LLM pipelines, retrieval, orchestration).
• Build and scale RAG systems, reranking pipelines, vector-based search.
• Define evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality and system performance.
• Analyze production behavior, identify failure modes, drive data-driven improvements.
• Make key architectural decisions across model infra, tooling, and workflows.
• Collaborate with product, platform, and domain teams to translate requirements.
• Lead best practices for reliable, observable, and cost-efficient AI systems.

Skills

10+ years software engineering

3+ years ML/AI systems

Production LLM systems

RAG, embeddings, vector databases

Python

Architectural decisions

Observability & reliability

Cost tradeoffs

Cross-functional collaboration

Strong communication

Tools

Pinecone

FAISS

Chroma

Temporal

Airflow

Job description

Harnham partners with a high-growth SaaS company to redefine enterprise trust via AI. You will shape AI architecture, systems, and long-term direction across LLMs, retrieval, and agent workflows in production.

The role demands owning end-to-end AI systems, building scalable RAG pipelines, and designing robust evaluation frameworks while collaborating with product, platform, and domain teams to deliver reliable and cost-efficient AI at scale.