Staff AI Platform Architect for Scalable AI Services

Nscale; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 293,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Flexible paid time off

Parental leave

Retirement plan

Job summary

Nscale is hiring a Staff AI Product Engineer to set architectural standards across the AI product domain and drive leverage for the entire engineering org. You will influence platform design, APIs, and system patterns that scale with demand and enable developers to ship quickly.

You will own end‑to‑end platform considerations including AI services, API gateway, developer experience, billing, identity, and extensibility surfaces used by customers and teams at scale.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of software engineering experience.
• Proven ability to set technical direction for a product domain, including cross-team architectural patterns.
• Deep expertise in API design, platform engineering, and large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience designing cloud services with clear control plane / data plane separation and cell-based architecture for horizontal scalability and blast-radius isolation.
• Experience building and operating developer-facing platforms used by large numbers of engineers or customers.
• Proven ability to define the provisioning contract other teams onboard onto: typed inputs, readiness semantics, published outputs, and declared dependencies between provisioned services.
• Experience with dependency-ordered composition across services owned by different teams — readiness gating, eventual concurrency, and sequencing changes.
• Track record of setting versioning and compatibility policy for customer-facing configuration surfaces, and sequencing changes across layers.
• Sustained hands‑on production ownership at scale and on‑call experience.
• Track record of raising stability across a domain: SLO and error‑budget policy and reliability trends.
• Experience making cost a first‑class engineering signal with usage attribution and guardrails.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the AI product platform domain across multiple teams.
• Drive cross-team architectural decisions: service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and platform standards.
• Identify and lead systemic improvements — performance, reliability, cost, or developer experience.
• Resolve ambiguous, open-ended technical problems where the solution space is undefined.
• Coach and grow Senior AI Product Engineers across teams; raise technical capability.
• Partner with product leadership and engineering managers to align technical strategy with business direction.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions for key platform capabilities and drive them to conclusions.
• Represent the product engineering domain in cross-functional architecture reviews.

Skills

API design

Platform engineering

Distributed systems

On-call ownership

Influence without authority

Cross-team collaboration

Cost optimization

SRE practices

Technical leadership

Architectural standards

Tools

Terraform

Job description

Nscale is hiring a Staff AI Product Engineer to set architectural standards across the AI product domain and drive leverage for the entire engineering org. You will influence platform design, APIs, and system patterns that scale with demand and enable developers to ship quickly.

You will own end‑to‑end platform considerations including AI services, API gateway, developer experience, billing, identity, and extensibility surfaces used by customers and teams at scale.