Principal AI Scientist & Agentic Tech Lead

robotsandpencils; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

robotsandpencils is seeking a senior data scientist and AI engineering leader to act as technical lead for a large agentic AI program. You will shape architecture, evaluation, and delivery while advising executives across multiple streams.

The role calls for setting direction, driving quality, and owning critical decisions when stakes are high. You will define strategies for multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, RAG, and streaming responses, while ensuring robust evaluation and governance

Qualifications

• 12+ years in data science and AI/ML with production-scale AI systems.
• Ability to communicate credibly with senior stakeholders and client leadership.
• Hands-on with LLMs, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, RAG, and vector databases.
• Deep expertise in model evaluation, experimentation design, and statistics.
• Strong Python skills and fluency with the ML stack.
• Background in MLOps, model versioning, monitoring, and reproducibility.

Responsibilities

• Provide senior technical oversight across all agentic AI workstreams from framing to deployment.
• Define technical strategy and reference architecture for agentic systems and tools.
• Manage cross-team dependencies, remove blockers, and sustain velocity and quality.
• Set standards for model development, experiments, and production transition.
• Establish evaluation frameworks covering quality, safety, cost, and latency.
• Mentor technical leads and own high-stakes decisions across the program.

Skills

Python

Executive presence

Stakeholder communication

LLMs & agentic systems

MLOps

Evaluation design

Tools

Vector databases

Embeddings

Model monitoring

Deployment automation

Job description

robotsandpencils is seeking a senior data scientist and AI engineering leader to act as technical lead for a large agentic AI program. You will shape architecture, evaluation, and delivery while advising executives across multiple streams.

The role calls for setting direction, driving quality, and owning critical decisions when stakes are high. You will define strategies for multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, RAG, and streaming responses, while ensuring robust evaluation and governance