Senior AI Systems Architect & Builder

Unusual Ventures; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Unusual Ventures is seeking a Senior Principal AI Engineer to lead hands-on technical work, architecting production AI systems, including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, and agentic workflows. You will mentor engineers, define architecture patterns, and drive decisions across data, AI pipelines, infrastructure, and APIs, balancing cost, reliability, and speed in production environments.

This role emphasizes builder mentality and real systems shipping in regulated or high-stakes settings,

Qualifications

• Over 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• Deep hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production.
• Strong architectural judgment across data, AI models, infra, and APIs.
• Excellent communication to explain tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build end-to-end AI systems including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, agentic workflows, and structured reasoning systems.
• Lead the design of multi-agent and tool-calling systems that operate reliably in production.
• Establish and evolve architecture patterns for scalable, cost-aware, and observable AI applications.
• Drive technical decisions across data modeling, AI pipelines, infrastructure, and APIs.
• Define best practices for evaluation, monitoring, and governance of AI systems in production.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and system-level debugging.
• Translate ambiguous business and domain problems into clear technical strategies.
• Stay ahead of emerging AI techniques and integrate what matters—without chasing hype.

Skills

AI systems

LLMs

Agentic architectures

Multi-agent systems

System architecture

TypeScript

Python

Go

Communication

Mentoring

Job description

Unusual Ventures is seeking a Senior Principal AI Engineer to lead hands-on technical work, architecting production AI systems, including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, and agentic workflows. You will mentor engineers, define architecture patterns, and drive decisions across data, AI pipelines, infrastructure, and APIs, balancing cost, reliability, and speed in production environments.

This role emphasizes builder mentality and real systems shipping in regulated or high-stakes settings,