Senior AI Architect & Production Systems Lead

Robots and Pencils; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Robots & Pencils, a leader in production AI, is seeking an AI Engineer/AI Architect to design and scale end-to-end AI systems for real-world business impact. You will own system architectures, guide ML pipelines, and mentor engineers while delivering observable performance, security, and cost-aware deployments.

This senior role partners with US-based clients and leverages advanced AWS capabilities to accelerate delivery.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or applied machine learning.
• Proven experience designing and deploying production AI systems.
• Strong software engineering background (Python or similar).
• Experience with distributed systems and scalable data architectures.
• Deep understanding of MLOps, model lifecycle management, and AI infrastructure.
• Experience building and maintaining ML pipelines and automated deployment workflows.
• Strong problem-solving skills and architectural judgment.
• Demonstrated leadership and mentoring experience.
• Excellent communication skills for technical and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define AI system architecture aligned to business objectives and long-term scalability.
• Translate AI opportunities into structured technical approaches.
• Design modular AI platforms supporting experimentation and production workloads.
• Establish architecture decision records and technical documentation standards.
• Lead design and implementation of ML systems, model services, and inference pipelines.
• Build scalable training, evaluation, and deployment workflows.
• Architect data ingestion, feature engineering, and model serving strategies.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and performance optimization of AI systems.
• Design end-to-end AI pipelines and agentic orchestration frameworks.
• Establish MLOps best practices including CI/CD, prompt versioning, and real-time observability.
• Optimize distributed inference systems and RAG performance.
• Ensure AI infrastructure aligns with security, compliance, and cost-efficiency standards.
• Bridge research and engineering by operationalizing prototypes into production-ready systems.
• Define evaluation metrics, validation processes, and rollout strategies.
• Improve iteration velocity through tooling and automation.
• Mentor junior and mid-level AI engineers; lead code reviews and enforce standards.
• Guide teams in trades across performance, scalability, cost, and complexity.
• Contribute to shared AI best practices and accelerators.
• Partner with product, engineering, and exec stakeholders to shape AI roadmaps.

Skills

AI/ML engineering

Distributed systems

Python

MLOps

Leadership

ML pipelines

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Job description

Robots & Pencils, a leader in production AI, is seeking an AI Engineer/AI Architect to design and scale end-to-end AI systems for real-world business impact. You will own system architectures, guide ML pipelines, and mentor engineers while delivering observable performance, security, and cost-aware deployments.

This senior role partners with US-based clients and leverages advanced AWS capabilities to accelerate delivery.