Staff AI Engineer

CloudTara Technologies; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudTara Technologies Inc. is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to set the technical direction for AI-powered products. You will lead the architecture, design production systems, and mentor engineers to raise the bar across teams.

You'll own evaluation frameworks, model selection, and safe, observable deployment, while partnering with Product, Design, and Data to turn business problems into scalable AI solutions in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years shipping ML/AI systems.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, tools/agents, evaluation.
• Strong Python skills; TypeScript/Go/Java a bonus.
• Experience designing scalable, distributed ML infrastructure (serving, latency, cost).
• Familiar with vector databases, orchestration, MLOps, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Track record of technical leadership across teams; able to influence roadmaps.
• Excellent communication to explain tradeoffs to engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and technical strategy for core AI systems including LLM apps and evaluation infra.
• Design and ship production-grade AI features that are fast, reliable, and cost-efficient.
• Build rigorous evaluation frameworks (offline and online) for model changes.
• Decide build-vs-buy and model selection across foundation models and open-source options.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data to turn business problems into AI solutions.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and drive engineering best practices.
• Establish standards for AI safety, observability, privacy, and responsible deployment.
• Stay close to AI research and pragmatically bring useful tooling into the stack.

Skills

Software engineering leadership

ML/AI systems in production

LLMs / Prompt engineering

Python

Distributed systems design

MLOps tooling

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Team mentoring / technical leadership

Communication skills

System architecture

Tools

AWS/GCP/Azure

Vector databases

Job description

We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer to set the technical direction for how we build, ship, and scale AI-powered products. You’ll be a hands‑on technical leader who takes ambiguous, high‑impact problems from research prototype to reliable production systems, and who raises the bar for the engineers around you.

What You’ll Do

• Own the architecture and technical strategy for our core AI systems, including LLM applications, retrieval, agents, and evaluation infrastructure
• Design and ship production‑grade AI features that are fast, reliable, cost‑efficient, and measurable
• Build rigorous evaluation frameworks (offline and online) so we can ship model and prompt changes with confidence
• Make build‑vs‑buy and model selection decisions across foundation models, fine‑tuned models, and open‑source options
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data teams to turn business problems into well‑scoped AI solutions
• Mentor engineers in the team, lead design reviews, and drive engineering best practices across teams
• Establish standards for AI safety, observability, privacy, and responsible deployment
• Stay close to the frontier of AI research and tooling, and pragmatically bring what works into our stack

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years building and shipping ML/AI systems in production
• Deep hands‑on experience with LLMs: prompt engineering, RAG, fine‑tuning, tool use/agents, and evaluation
• Strong programming skills in Python (plus TypeScript/Go/Java is a bonus) and solid software design fundamentals
• Experience designing scalable, distributed systems and ML infrastructure (serving, latency optimization, cost control)
• Familiarity with the modern AI stack: vector databases, orchestration frameworks, MLOps tooling, and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• A track record of technical leadership across teams, including influencing roadmaps without relying on authority
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain complex tradeoffs to both engineers and executives

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi‑agent systems, model distillation, or on‑device/edge inference
• Contributions to open‑source AI projects, publications, or conference talks
• Background in FinTech
• Experience building AI products from 0 to 1 in a startup environment