Senior AI Engineer: Production-Grade LLM Systems

Empathy Talent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Empathy Talent partners with a fast-growing tech company to hire a Senior AI Engineer who will lead production AI systems from concept to production. You’ll design agentic architectures, build evaluation frameworks, and ship reliable AI experiences at scale.

You will own AI capabilities across development, deployment, reliability, and observability, balancing model intelligence with stable software behavior.

Qualifications

• 3–6+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
• Strong experience with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Experience with relational databases such as Postgres.
• Demonstrated experience shipping LLM-powered products or features into production.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents, agent orchestration, or multi-step LLM workflows.
• Experience with retrieval pipelines, embeddings, vector databases, and RAG architectures.
• Familiarity with leading foundation-model APIs and modern AI development tooling.
• Strong understanding of production software architecture, APIs, data systems, observability, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Build Production AI Systems.
• Design and build agentic systems that automate complex workflows.
• Orchestrate LLMs, tools, retrieval systems, APIs, and business logic into production-grade apps.
• Own AI capabilities throughout lifecycle: development, deployment, reliability, performance, observability.
• Balance model intelligence with predictable software behavior.
• Develop and optimize agent orchestration, tool use, and reasoning workflows.
• Build evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, and guardrails to improve AI performance.
• Design prompts, retrieval pipelines, and orchestration logic.
• Work with vector databases, embeddings, and modern LLM APIs.
• Prototype rapidly and turn concepts into scalable systems.

Skills

3–6+ years software engineering

Python

TypeScript

Postgres

LLM-powered products

AI agents

agent orchestration

retrieval pipelines

vector databases

LLM APIs

Tools

LLM APIs

Vector databases

Retrieval pipelines

Embeddings

RAG architectures

Job description

Empathy Talent partners with a fast-growing tech company to hire a Senior AI Engineer who will lead production AI systems from concept to production. You’ll design agentic architectures, build evaluation frameworks, and ship reliable AI experiences at scale.

You will own AI capabilities across development, deployment, reliability, and observability, balancing model intelligence with stable software behavior.