Senior AI Engineer & Technical Architect (Hands-On)

Salt; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Salt is hiring a Lead AI Engineer for a new US-based AI engineering initiative. This senior, hands-on leadership role blends software engineering with architecture, and includes mentorship of senior engineers while actively contributing to production code.

You will define technical direction, build AI services and agentic workflows, and collaborate with Security, Data, Infrastructure, Product, and Engineering teams to establish robust, scalable AI foundations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with ownership of backend systems.
• Python 5+ years in backend services and AI integrations.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the AI engineering pod and own architecture decisions.
• Spend ~50%+ time hands-on writing and reviewing production code.
• Build backend AI services, LLM orchestration layers, APIs, and frontend integrations.
• Design agentic AI experiences with multi-step and multi-agent workflows.
• Ensure observability, SLOs, reliability, and security across systems.
• Mentor a pod of senior software and data engineers.
• Collaborate with Security, Data, Infrastructure, Product, and Engineering teams.

Skills

Technical leadership

Mentorship

Hands-on coding

Python

React

TypeScript

AWS

LLM/AI

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

React

TypeScript

AWS

Docker

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

Terraform

OpenTofu

Job description

Salt is hiring a Lead AI Engineer for a new US-based AI engineering initiative. This senior, hands-on leadership role blends software engineering with architecture, and includes mentorship of senior engineers while actively contributing to production code.

You will define technical direction, build AI services and agentic workflows, and collaborate with Security, Data, Infrastructure, Product, and Engineering teams to establish robust, scalable AI foundations.