Staff AI Engineer (Data & Intelligence function)

Acquia, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join our Data & Intelligence function. You will design, build, and ship production AI systems that turn data into actionable insights for customers and teams.

You will work across observability, core data platform, and insights, collaborating with product and platform teams to deliver scalable, high-impact AI capabilities, with hands-on coding and rapid iteration.

Responsibilities

• Write and ship production AI code daily.
• Lead our work on making customer context retrievable at speed, across semantic retrieval, indexing, and knowledge graph approaches over our data platform. An early priority is letting an agent resolve a customer and pull its full context in a single request.
• Build the inference and signal layer: models and processors that read from our Iceberg-based lakehouse, write scored inference back, and expose signals through contracts other teams can build against.
• Take signals through to action, turning detected conditions such as churn risk, usage and entitlement mismatch, or expansion opportunity into workflows that act, with human review where that is the right design.
• Choose the right tool for each workload: a large model, a small fine-tuned model, or ordinary deterministic code. Managing inference cost is part of the job.
• Own evaluation and observability for our AI systems, so we can show a signal is sound before anyone acts on it.
• Set the patterns other teams build against, and work with engineering and business leaders to turn company goals into shipped systems.

Job description

About Acquia

Acquia empowers the world's most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out.

Headquartered in Boston, MA, Acquia is a Great Place to Work-Certified company, is listed as one of the world's top software companies by The Software Report, and is positioned as a market leader by the analyst community. We are Acquia. We are building for the future and we want you to be a part of it!

Career Exploration at Acquia

Our recruitment process is designed to empower you in making the most informed decisions. Acquia is committed to providing an inclusive, transparent, efficient, and educational interview experience that cultivates exploration into career opportunities at Acquia.

You will discover the opportunity to grow your career here and learn from a global team that empowers you to exceed boundaries and achieve the extraordinary.

Acquia is the digital experience platform built for a world where your audience isn't only human. Its agents too.

As AI agents become active participants in how people discover, consume, and act on digital content, Acquia gives enterprise teams the platform to create, manage, and distribute experiences designed for both. Powered by agentic AI that orchestrates - not just advises - Acquia automates complex digital workflows within the governance guardrails large organizations require.

The world's #1 Drupal hosting provider, Acquia brings together Content Management, Digital Asset Management, and Product Information Management in a single AI-powered Command Center: Acquia Source.

Acquia. Built for every audience, human or otherwise.

The Role

Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join our Data & Intelligence function. Acquia runs one of the largest Drupal and digital experience footprints in the world, and holds more than a decade of operational, product, and customer data across it. This role exists to put that data to work: building the retrieval, graph, and inference layers on top of our data platform, and the agentic and deterministic systems that turn the resulting signals into action for our customers and our teams.

The remit is broad. Our function spans observability, our core data platform, and insights and intelligence, and you will work across all three alongside the product and platform teams that consume what we build. Scope moves with company priorities, so we are looking for someone comfortable changing context and picking up an unfamiliar problem. Much of what you build will be shared capability that several teams depend on.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will spend most of your time designing, building, and shipping production systems, and you will lift the AI engineering capability of the teams around you through the quality of your work rather than through management overhead. We ship early and iterate.

Key Responsibilities

• Write and ship production AI code daily. You are an active contributor.
• Lead our work on making customer context retrievable at speed, across semantic retrieval, indexing, and knowledge graph approaches over our data platform. An early priority is letting an agent resolve a customer and pull its full context in a single request. Where that work goes from there is partly yours to define.
• Build the inference and signal layer: models and processors that read from our Iceberg-based lakehouse, write scored inference back, and expose signals through contracts other teams can build against.
• Take signals through to action, turning detected conditions such as churn risk, usage and entitlement mismatch, or expansion opportunity into workflows that act, with human review where that is the right design.
• Choose the right tool for each workload: a large model, a small fine-tuned model, or ordinary deterministic code. Managing inference cost is part of the job.
• Own evaluation and observability for our AI systems, so we can show a signal is sound before anyone acts on it.
• Set the patterns other teams build against, and work with engineering and business leaders to turn company goals into shipped systems.

How We Think About Experience

We are more interested in how you learn than in the tools already on your CV. Our stack spans Python, SQL and dbt, distributed query engines, durable workflow orchestration, an Iceberg lakehouse on S3, and a changing mix of model providers and agent frameworks. It will look different in a year. We expect you to arrive without deep expertise in some of it and to close that gap fast, using AI to read unfamiliar codebases and get to a useful contribution before you are fully fluent. Range across languages, data platforms, and mod