Senior AI/ML Architect - Lead Agent Systems & Production AI

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

Job summary

Harnham partners with a high-growth AI-native data infrastructure startup to lead the technical direction of AI agents and retrieval systems. You will own architecture, evaluation strategy, and production-grade codegen capabilities, shaping how AI features are built at scale.

You'll guide multi-step agent design, mentor engineers, and drive complex initiatives from design through production in an environment with significant ownership and ambiguity.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant AI/ML depth and a track record of technical leadership.
• Demonstrated experience owning and shipping AI agents or coding agents in production at scale.
• Strong Python skills with deep hands-on experience across RAG, vector databases, and knowledge graphs (Neo4j).
• Ability to make architectural decisions under uncertainty and drive them through to production.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across multi-step agent architecture, RAG pipelines, and knowledge retrieval systems.
• Own the AI behind the platform's core code generation capability, from prompt design to output validation at scale.
• Lead large, complex initiatives end-to-end with minimal direction, defining the problem as much as the solution.
• Shape how production AI gets built across the team, establishing standards for evaluation, observability, and reliability.
• Influence architectural decisions across the broader engineering organisation and mentor engineers at all levels.

Skills

AI leadership

Python

Architectural decisions

Problem solving

Tools

Neo4j

AWS

Kubernetes

Vector databases

Job description

Harnham partners with a high-growth AI-native data infrastructure startup to lead the technical direction of AI agents and retrieval systems. You will own architecture, evaluation strategy, and production-grade codegen capabilities, shaping how AI features are built at scale.

You'll guide multi-step agent design, mentor engineers, and drive complex initiatives from design through production in an environment with significant ownership and ambiguity.