Staff AI Engineer – Data & Intelligence Platform

Devconnectplatform; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 110,000 - 170,000; 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 code that makes customer context retrievable at speed, using embeddings, vector search, and graph retrieval on our Iceberg lakehouse.

You will shape inference layers and signal processing, turning insights into automated actions with human-in-the-loop where needed. You will work across observability, data platform, and insights teams, owning end-to-end AI systems

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years shipping AI or ML systems to production.
• Strong programming fundamentals and deep proficiency in at least one language used for AI and data work. Python is our primary language for ML and insights.
• Fluency working with data at scale — advanced SQL, a transformation layer such as dbt, and a distributed query engine over lakehouse or warehouse storage, including reasoning about query cost and partitioning.
• Production retrieval and context engineering — embeddings, vector search, hybrid or graph retrieval, and measuring whether retrieval is actually working.
• Agentic systems and durable workflows in production, with tool calling, state and memory, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Evaluation and observability for AI systems — tracing, prompt and version management, and dataset-driven testing, whatever the tooling.
• Cloud deployment experience (AWS preferred) with containerized services, and ownership of inference cost.
• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

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.
• 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.

Skills

Python

SQL

AI systems

Data at scale

Retrieval

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

dbt

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join our Data & Intelligence function. You will design, build, and ship production AI code that makes customer context retrievable at speed, using embeddings, vector search, and graph retrieval on our Iceberg lakehouse.

You will shape inference layers and signal processing, turning insights into automated actions with human-in-the-loop where needed. You will work across observability, data platform, and insights teams, owning end-to-end AI systems