Staff Engineer - AI

Wonder; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 202,500 - 247,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401K

Multiple medical, dental, and vision plans

Job summary

Wonder in New York is seeking a Staff Engineer to develop a personalized meal planning product powered by AI and LLM. This role requires extensive experience in building AI systems, architecting distributed infrastructure, and driving technical strategy. In this position, you will work closely with both product and engineering teams to produce impactful tools that enhance meal planning and nutrition. The role offers a competitive salary of $225,000 per year, along with equity and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep distributed systems expertise for high-throughput, low-latency workloads.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents and LLM-powered features in production.
• Prior experience as a founder or early-stage technical leader at a startup.
• Strong system design skills with a track record of shipping scalable software.
• Proficiency with backend frameworks and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for our AI food agent.
• Architect and scale distributed infrastructure for real-time retrieval and inference.
• Make architectural decisions affecting product-wide scope.
• Establish evaluation and experimentation infrastructure for AI improvement.

Skills

AI and ML-driven systems

Distributed systems expertise

Backend development frameworks

Python

TypeScript

System design

Education

Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related technical field

Tools

Modern ML tooling

Job description

About Wonder

Everything’s on the menu at Wonder. Except compromise.

Wonder is the mealtime platform built to feed every craving in one order. With Wonder, you can mix and match hundreds of dishes from 20+ exclusive restaurants in a single order, so everyone gets exactly what they’re craving. Enjoy everything from tacos to Thai with $0 delivery fees, plus dine-in or pick up at a Wonder location near you. Each dish is made to order on-site by our culinary team and served hot.

Behind the scenes, Wonder owns and operates every step of the dining experience, from recipe development to the technology that powers our experience, allowing us to deliver quality, variety, and consistency at scale.

Join us as we work to make great food more accessible.

About The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer in our AI and Robotics org, you will build a food agent, a personalized meal planning and nutrition product that blends LLM-driven recommendations, health-aligned goal setting, and agentic ordering. You'll shape technical strategy, make key architectural calls, and personally drive high-complexity work from design through production. This role is for someone who has built AI agents and LLM-powered products before, ideally as a founder, founding engineer, or early-stage technical leader, and who is deeply curious about how these systems actually behave at scale. This is not a planning role: you'll write code, review code, and ship code every day.

The Impact You Will Make

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for our AI food agent, spanning recommendation, personalization, agentic ordering, and health-aligned meal planning
• Architect and scale distributed infrastructure for real-time retrieval, vector search, multi-modal inference, and LLM orchestration
• Serve as technical decision‑maker for architectural choices with product‑wide scope, including data pipelines, model serving, prompt orchestration, RAG, fallback logic, and evaluation frameworks
• Establish evaluation and experimentation infrastructure: evals, benchmarks, scoring criteria, A/B testing pipelines, and feedback loops that make the AI measurably better over time

What You Bring to the Table

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years building and shipping AI or ML‑driven systems in production
• Deep distributed systems expertise; you’ve architected infrastructure that handles high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads at scale
• Hands‑on experience building AI agents, LLM‑powered features, or agentic workflows in production; you’ve worked with retrieval pipelines, prompt orchestration, embedding‑based systems, and model evaluation
• Prior experience as a founder, founding engineer, or early‑stage technical leader at a startup; you know what it takes to build from zero with limited resources
• Proficiency with backend development frameworks and cloud infrastructure; familiarity with Python, TypeScript, and modern ML tooling
• Strong system design skills with a track record of shipping scalable, production‑grade software under real constraints
• A degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience)

Our hybrid model requires 3 days a week in the office. That said, many team members choose to come in more often to take advantage of in‑person collaboration and connection. You’re welcome—and encouraged—to be in the office up to 5 days a week if it works for you.

New York: $225,000 per year.

Benefits

We offer a competitive salary package including equity and 401K. Additionally, we provide multiple medical, dental, and vision plans to meet all of our employees’ needs as well as many benefits and perks that are not listed.

A Final Note

At Wonder, we build the best teams by hiring with an objective lens — evaluating people for their potential while championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, marital status, disability, or any other protected class. As part of our commitment to fair and compliant hiring practices, Wonder participates in the federal government’s E‑Verify program to confirm employment eligibility. If you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.