Senior AI Systems Builder & Production Architect

Unusual; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Unusual seeks a Senior Principal AI Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across complex, production-grade AI systems. You will architect and ship end-to-end AI platforms, including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, and agentic workflows, while mentoring senior engineers and guiding architectural strategy.

You will drive decisions across data, AI pipelines, and infrastructure, balancing performance, cost, and reliability.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript, React, Go, Python and modern AI frameworks.
• Extensive experience with LLMs, including RAG, tool use, prompt systems, and agentic architectures.
• Proven ability to design and ship large-scale AI systems that run reliably in real-world environments.
• Deep understanding of AI failure modes: hallucination, drift, brittleness, latency, and cost blowups.
• Excellent communication skills - able to explain technical tradeoffs to both 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

TypeScript

React

Go

Python

LLMs

Agentic workflows

System design

Architectural judgement

Tools

Graph databases

Graph query languages

MLOps

AI frameworks

Job description

Unusual seeks a Senior Principal AI Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across complex, production-grade AI systems. You will architect and ship end-to-end AI platforms, including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, and agentic workflows, while mentoring senior engineers and guiding architectural strategy.

You will drive decisions across data, AI pipelines, and infrastructure, balancing performance, cost, and reliability.