Staff AI Architect & Builder

Robots & Pencils; California; On-site; USD 124,000 - 171,000; Full time

Job summary

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Staff AI Builder to lead the design and delivery of AI/ML systems, owning end-to-end architecture and driving technical leadership across the team.

You’ll build agentic workflows, develop RAG pipelines, integrate with AWS Bedrock, and craft production prompts with strong observability. This role emphasizes reliability, security, and scalable AI across enterprise applications.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with GenAI/LLM systems in production.
• Hands-on depth in agentic AI: reasoning loops, tool calling, multi-agent orchestration.
• Practical RAG expertise: embeddings, vector DBs, re-ranking.
• Experience building evaluation and observability for LLM systems.
• Strong prompt engineering with production-grade prompts and constraints.
• AWS GenAI stack experience: Bedrock, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, Step Functions.
• Strong Python and Node.js skills across full-stack and APIs.
• Knowledge of production reliability patterns: retries, circuit breakers, fallback models.
• Experience with Docker and cloud-native deployment.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, integration-heavy problems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agentic workflows with multi-agent orchestration and clear pattern choices.
• Build and maintain RAG pipelines with chunking, embeddings, and vector search.
• Integrate with AWS Bedrock and Agent Core, including MCP-based tool design.
• Write and iterate production prompts with structured role framing and constraints.
• Add evaluation/observability: golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, tracing tools.
• Design for LLM failure with retries, backoff, and fallback strategies.
• Develop backend services in Python/Node.js, using serverless architectures.
• Design DynamoDB single-table schemas for conversation state and memory.
• Support event-driven orchestration (Step Functions, SQS, EventBridge).
• Collaborate with frontend teams to integrate agentic features for users.

Skills

GenAI/LLM

Python

Node.js

RESTful APIs

Docker

AWS Bedrock

DynamoDB

OpenSearch

LangFuse

LangSmith

Prompt engineering

Observability

System design

Tools

AWS Lambda

API Gateway

S3

SQS

EventBridge

Job description

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Staff AI Builder to lead the design and delivery of AI/ML systems, owning end-to-end architecture and driving technical leadership across the team.

You’ll build agentic workflows, develop RAG pipelines, integrate with AWS Bedrock, and craft production prompts with strong observability. This role emphasizes reliability, security, and scalable AI across enterprise applications.