Staff AI Engineer: Production ML & Retrieval Systems

Webhosting; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Parental leave

Recognition programs

Job summary

Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join the Data & Intelligence function. The role focuses on building retrieval, graph, and inference layers on our data platform, enabling agentic and deterministic systems that translate signals into actions for customers and teams.

You will work across observability, core data platform, and insights teams, delivering production-grade AI systems while mentoring others through the quality of your work.

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 the 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.

Responsibilities

• Write and ship production AI code daily as an active contributor.
• Lead retrieval and context engineering across semantic retrieval, indexing, and knowledge graph approaches.
• Build the inference and signal layer with models and processors reading from lakehouse and exposing signals.
• Turn signals into workflows with human-reviewed design where appropriate.
• Choose tools for workloads; manage inference cost.
• Own evaluation and observability for AI systems.

Skills

AI/ML in production

Python

SQL

Data at scale

System design

Communication skills

Tools

Temporal

LangGraph

dbt

Job description

Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join the Data & Intelligence function. The role focuses on building retrieval, graph, and inference layers on our data platform, enabling agentic and deterministic systems that translate signals into actions for customers and teams.

You will work across observability, core data platform, and insights teams, delivering production-grade AI systems while mentoring others through the quality of your work.