Senior Staff AI Engineer

XPENG; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 244,000 - 413,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fun environment

Impact on transportation revolution

Cutting-edge technology

Job summary

XPENG is seeking a hands-on Senior Staff AI Engineer to build scalable production-grade AI systems driving measurable impact. You will own end-to-end AI delivery, partnering with product and engineering to translate high-value use cases into scalable, secure architectures.

You will lead design, evaluation, and governance of AI solutions leveraging LLMs, RAG, and agentic workflows, while raising the bar for reliability and performance across teams.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering delivering production-grade systems.
• Deep AI/ML expertise with LLMs, retrieval/grounding, embeddings, and eval frameworks.
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems in production.
• Experience designing evaluation systems and agent benchmarking pipelines.
• Proven ability to create feedback loops from production to model improvement.
• Expertise in AI observability and tracing (OpenTelemetry-based tooling).
• Experience architecting enterprise-scale AI systems with reusable components.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and hands-on development of AI applications and platforms using state-of-the-art LLM stacks.
• Define long-term architecture standards for Applied AI across product areas.
• Translate high-value opportunities into roadmaps with measurable outcomes.
• Collaborate with adjacent engineering groups to reuse components and avoid duplication.
• Drive continuous improvement in AI methodologies and governance practices.
• Ensure security, privacy, safety, and auditability across the AI lifecycle.
• Champion AI literacy and enablement through demos and leadership.

Skills

AI/ML

LLM development

Retrieval/grounding

Agentic workflows

Evaluation systems

Observability

Security/compliance

Cross-functional leadership

Production-grade systems

Learning agility

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS or related

Tools

OpenTelemetry

LangFuse

RAG frameworks

LLM tooling

Job description

XPENG is a leading smart technology company at the forefront of innovation, integrating advanced AI and autonomous driving technologies into its vehicles, including electric vehicles (EVs), electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and robotics. With a strong focus on intelligent mobility, XPENG is dedicated to reshaping the future of transportation through cutting-edge R&D in AI, machine learning, and smart connectivity.

We are looking for a hands-on Senior Staff AI Engineer to build and scale production-grade AI systems that drive measurable impact across internal teams. This role owns the end-to-end delivery of applied AI solutions—partnering with product, engineering, and cross-functional teams across the organization to identify high-value use cases, and translating them into scalable systems using LLMs, retrieval, and agentic workflows. You will also define architecture and reusable patterns to enable AI adoption broadly, while setting a high bar for reliability, evaluation, and performance.

Job Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical design and hands-on development of prioritized AI applications, services, and platforms leveraging state-of-the-art LLM app stacks, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, and scalable serving.
• Define long-term architecture and engineering standards for Applied AI systems to maximize reuse, reliability, and impact across multiple product areas.
• Partner with business sponsors to translate high-value opportunities into roadmaps and shipped products with clear success metrics and measurable outcomes.
• Build a holistic view of AI investments by collaborating with adjacent engineering groups implementing AI in their domains, aligning patterns, reusing components, and avoiding duplication.
• Drive continuous improvement in AI methodologies and best practices; evaluate emerging capabilities and land them as secure, production-grade systems.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to embed robust governance, privacy, security, safety, and reporting practices across the AI lifecycle.
• Champion AI literacy, enablement, and adoption through demos, guidance, and technical leadership across the organization.
• Establish rigorous evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring practices; instrument offline and online metrics to ensure quality, safety, and SLOs.

Minimum Skill Requirements:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record delivering complex, production-grade systems.
• Deep technical expertise in AI/ML, with hands-on experience building and deploying systems using language models, retrieval/grounding (RAG), embeddings/vector search, and evaluation frameworks.
• Hands-on experience building and scaling agentic AI systems in production environments.
• Strong experience designing and implementing evaluation systems, including LLM-as-Judge frameworks, metric design, synthetic data generation, and agent benchmarking pipelines.
• Proven ability to establish feedback loops from production systems into evaluation and model improvement workflows.
• Expertise in AI/LLM observability and tracing, including instrumentation of systems and analysis of trace data for performance, latency, and correctness (e.g., OpenTelemetry-based tools such as LangFuse or equivalent).
• Experience architecting and deploying enterprise-scale AI systems or subsystems, with the ability to define technical direction, architecture, and reusable platform components across teams.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• Agent memory systems (context management, long-term persistence, retrieval optimization).
• AI gateways / tool orchestration layers (e.g., MCP, service integration, authorization, tool discovery).
• Agentic workflows and orchestration (multi-step planning, tool calling, error recovery, concurrency).
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous problems into scalable AI systems with measurable impact.
• Experience driving engineering standards, improving system reliability, observability, and performance (latency, throughput, cost).
• Strong familiarity with security, privacy, compliance, safety, and auditability in enterprise AI systems.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence and align across engineering, product, and other internal teams.
• Proven ability to learn and apply new technologies quickly through hands-on development.

Preferred Skill Requirements:

• Experience building custom evaluation harnesses or contributing to open-source harness frameworks.
• Contributions to widely used third-party benchmarks or evaluation suites.
• Hands-on experience developing and evaluating coding agents or code-generation systems.
• Experience working with and deploying open-source language models.

What do we provide:

• A fun, supportive and engaging environment.
• Opportunity to make significant impact on transportation revolution by the means of advancing autonomous driving.
• Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies with the top talent in the field.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Snacks, lunches and fun activities.

The base salary range for this full-time position is $244,140 - $413,160, in addition to bonus, equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified persons without regard to race, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status or marital status or any other prescribed category set forth in federal or state regulations.