Staff AI Engineer - AI Infrastructure & Agentic Platform

ShiftKey; Town of Poland (NY); Hybrid; USD 87,139 - 94,204; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Growth opportunities

Vacation and wellness days

Modern Warsaw office with river views

Private medical package

Sports card

Life and accident insurance

Job summary

ShiftKey in Poland is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to own the AI infrastructure layer, including the organizational knowledge platform and cloud-hosted AI agents. You will advance retrieval, HyDE-inspired ranking, and agentic tooling while partnering with the platform team and senior leadership.

The role emphasizes high autonomy, architecture ownership, cost governance, and HIPAA-conscious data handling, with hybrid work options from Warsaw and a path to scale the platform for internal tools and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience building/operating production AI/LLM systems.
• Proficient in retrieval engineering and hybrid search.
• Experience with agentic frameworks and cost governance.
• Fluent in Go, Python, or TypeScript with ability to ramp.
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry) and Terraform.
• Familiarity with HIPAA-style data-handling requirements.

Responsibilities

• Evolve the AI knowledge platform and retrieval stack for organization-wide use.
• Architect and operate multi-step, tool-using AI systems on AWS with cost guardrails.
• Design graph-based retrieval across data sources for multi-hop queries.
• Collaborate with product engineering to define the AI platform API.
• Build reference agent implementations for incident triage and support.
• Own the AI infrastructure cost model and governance.

Skills

Software engineering

AI/LLM production systems

Retrieval engineering

Agentive infrastructure

Go/Python/TypeScript

Terraform

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS Bedrock

Azure AI Foundry

Terraform

Job description

About ShiftKey

ShiftKey is a platform that is disrupting the way healthcare facilities find licensed and certified professionals to fill available shifts. Leveraging marketplace dynamics and deep industry knowledge, the company is helping mitigate America’s healthcare staffing shortages by enabling direct connections between facilities and healthcare professionals. By offering the opportunity to work as much or as little as they choose and returning power to healthcare workers, ShiftKey is bringing more licensed professionals back into the workforce in a solution that addresses a major crisis in healthcare. For more information, visit ShiftKey.com.

The role

ShiftKey is a healthcare workforce marketplace operating in a regulated (HIPAA) environment, and we are building toward being an AI-native company. We are past the experimentation phase but not done yet, and this middle stage is exactly why this role exists.

The Staff AI Engineer owns ShiftKey’s AI infrastructure layer: the organizational knowledge platform, the infrastructure for hosting and operating AI agents in the cloud, and the retrieval layer powering both internal engineering tools and customer-facing capabilities.

A retrieval stack is already in production, serving real workflows today. The next layer of the platform is in active development. The most ambitious parts—richer retrieval over organizational knowledge, agentic infrastructure, the platform API surface, and the cost-governance model that keeps running within budget in a regulated environment—are yours to architect and own.

You will not be maintaining someone else’s finished platform, and you will not be starting from a blank page. You will inherit serious retrieval foundations and own the architecture of everything that comes next. You will have high autonomy and organization-wide influence, partnering directly with the platform team, AI ambassadors across engineering, and senior engineering leadership.

Monthly gross remuneration for this position ranges from PLN 29,600 to PLN 32,000 under an employment contract (CoE/umowa o pracę). Final compensation is determined based on experience and skill level.

Where you'll work

You must be located in Poland to be considered for this position. We prefer candidates based in the Warsaw Metropolitan Area, with flexibility to choose between remote work or working from our office in Warsaw.

What you'll be doing

• Evolving the AI knowledge platform—taking the retrieval, indexing, and synthesis layer (currently semantic RAG + re-ranking + HyDE) to an organization-wide platform serving both internal engineering tools and customer-facing capabilities.

• Architecting and operating agentic infrastructure on AWS—multi-step, tool-using AI systems that plan, retrieve, and act on complex queries and operational events, with cost guardrails and observability built in from day one.

• Designing and building graph-based, relationship-aware retrieval across the organization\'s data sources, enabling multi-hop queries and letting agents accumulate organizational knowledge over time. This is on our roadmap, not in production — you will define the approach.

• Partnering with product engineering to define the AI platform API surface, translating infrastructure primitives into developer-ready abstractions.

• Building reference agent implementations on the platform—operational-incident triage, customer support, and future agentic use cases—grounding each agent\'s reasoning in institutional knowledge.

• Owning the AI infrastructure cost model: monitoring compute, model, and storage spend, flagging anomalies, and proposing guardrails to keep workloads within defined budgets.

What you'll need

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building and operating production AI/LLM application systems—not research, not prototyping, not demos.

• Retrieval engineering beyond the basics. Our stack already includes re-ranking and HyDE; we need someone who has worked at or above that level: hybrid search, re-ranking, query transformation, context-window management, and evaluation of retrieval quality in production.

• Working experience with agentic frameworks and multi-step reasoning loops—tool use, iteration control, cost governance, and model routing trade-offs.

• Production-grade software engineering fluency (strict typing, testing, async/concurrency, modern toolchain) in Go, Python, or TypeScript, with the ability to ramp into another quickly.

• Hands-on experience operating AI workloads on a managed cloud AI platform (AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry), including the identity/secrets model and model access governance. Bedrock preferred given our AWS stack.

• Hands-on Terraform experience — able to author and provision new infrastructure independently, not just modify existing modules.

• Familiarity with production observability for AI systems: metrics, structured logging for model spend and latency, and evaluation harnesses to detect regressions.

• Understanding of HIPAA-style data-handling requirements in a regulated SaaS environment. Prior healthcare experience is a plus, not a requirement.

Perks of working for ShiftKey

• A high-growth, friendly, and engaging work environment with opportunities for career development.

• Additional vacation days for better work-life balance.

• Modern office in Warsaw’s Powiśle district with Vistula River views, recreational facilities, and great nearby restaurants.

• Thoughtfully designed private medical package to take care of what matters most.

• Sports card to fuel your active lifestyle.

• Life and accident insurance for peace of mind.

Our Commitment to Diversity

ShiftKey is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to embracing diverse and individual perspectives shaping our culture and contributing to the solutions that transform the world. We actively work to create an inclusive environment for employees to thrive.

EEO Statement

ShiftKey does not discriminate based on race, religion, color, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable law. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. ShiftKey is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with a mental or physical disability, please contact: accommodations shiftkey dot com.