Member of Technical Staff: Core AI Platform

Lightspeed AI, Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightspeed AI, Inc. seeks a Member of Technical Staff to own the core platform powering reinforcement learning and recursive-self-improvement of agents. You’ll drive architecture, scale, and integration of datastores and loops in a distributed system.

Collaborate with the founding team to turn RL research into production-ready capabilities, mentor engineers, and shape an engineering culture that blends human expertise with AI to deliver impact at scale.

Qualifications

• Deep experience in agentic AI systems or robust software architectures.
• Strong product sense and value delivery.
• Ability to defend technical choices with clear reasoning.
• Self-motivated with initiative in uncertain environments.

Responsibilities

• Turn RL research into a scalable, production-ready platform.
• Own the architecture and stack for future agentic software.
• Develop the platform from concept through deployment with feedback loops.
• Help shape the engineering culture blending human expertise and AI.
• Mentor growth of future technical hires and AI coding agents.

Job description

Why This Role is Different

You will be the owner of the core platform that powers reinforcement learning and recursive-self improvement of agents. As an engineer who owns our core platform, you will be responsible for how it all comes together under the hood to power an amazing distributed system of agents, datastores, and loops.

This is not a role to look at the next issue that's been prioritized and neatly package it up, fire up Claude Code, enter a prompt, and walk away. You'll be at the heart of building cutting edge technologies that power our research, and in turn, tackling challenges of how to turn research into reality, at scale, for our customers.

As a Member of Technical Staff, you will work directly with our founding team who have been through architecting a hyperscaler AI platform from first principles, invented one of the core MLOps frameworks, literally wrote the book on explainable AI, and led safety critical evals for Gemini. We like to dive deep, and slow down to tackle really tough challenges so we can build up momentum to deliver quickly.

What you'll do

• Turn RL research into Reality (& probably invent some RL along the way): Working with our research team, you'll be responsible for turning our applied RL research and theory into a scalable, sustainable platform. RL is open-ended, and so we expect you to also roll up your sleeves, grab a whiteboard marker, and contribute to research along the way.
• Own the Architecture & Stack: You will be leading architectural evolutions for the future of agentic software.
• Platform: You will own a significant part of the initial product, from concept to feature design to implementation to customer feedback to deployment. You are not bound by PRDs and technical design docs.
• Build our Engineering DNA: You will be a key participant in defining the technical culture that blends human expertise and AI agent utility. We are not afraid of adapting the new way of doing software development with AI, while we blend it with the battle tested patterns of software engineering architecture in the past decades.
• Growth & Mentoring: You will directly contribute to the growth of the team of future technical hires, as well as the team of AI coding agents, to elevate the product.

What we're looking for

• Expert in the field: You have deep experiences and expertise in developing agentic AI systems, and guiding principles in designing and evaluating such systems. Alternatively, you have deep experiences in decades of highly robust software architectures that you are willing to apply to the new era of agentic AI systems.
• Product-minded: You aspire to deliver not only software with great technologies implemented, but you aspire to deliver a software product that materializes great values to customers.
• Low ego, but lead with high conviction: You are comfortable being challenged, try out many ideas, but willing to defend well-reasoned technical choices you make.
• Resourceful, self-starter and self-motivator: We are in the middle of the disrupting paradigm shift in both software development and software product development. Under such uncertainty, you enjoy riding on the driver’s seat, and find ways to build high impact solutions, with limited resources.

Strong Pluses

• Datastores & Integrations: You have designed, built, and dealt with the real world implications of architecting datastores at scale and complexity.
• API, CLI, MCP experience: How should machines talk to each other? You know how to make them harmonize!
• Graduate degree in CS/ML or industry-experience equivalent: You've demonstrated ability to tackle difficult, open-ended questions and turn them intro tractable solutions