Staff Engineer, AI

LiteLLM; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founders collaboration

Open source contributions

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

LiteLLM is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the unified API team, owning end-to-end model, endpoint, and provider rollouts. You will design provider-agnostic features at the gateway level and mentor engineers focused on LLM translation issues.

You will report to the CEO and later the Head of Engineering. This in-person role in San Francisco includes relocation and H-1B transfer support. You will shape the product's core API used by thousands of teams.

Qualifications

• You've been a machine learning engineer and now build applied AI products.
• 3+ years of experience. The scope you've owned matters more than a Staff title.
• Deep expertise in LLM APIs. You can speak to the differences between /chat/completions and /responses, and to each provider's nuances.
• Experience building or maintaining a unified API that sits in front of many providers.
• Taste in developer experience. You can tell when an API or playground is bad and explain why.
• Customer empathy. You ask why a user wants something and how big the use case is before you build it.
• Ready to lead a team from day one and set the technical bar yourself.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python.

Responsibilities

• Lead the unified API team and own new model, endpoint, and provider rollouts end to end.
• Design provider-agnostic features at the gateway level, such as session management for non-OpenAI models.
• Triage open source issues and outside PRs (new providers, translation fixes) and get them merged, reviewed, or replaced with an internal fix.
• Review the AI team's PRs and hold a high bar for code quality, including code written with AI.
• Find the power users in your area and use what they need to decide what to build next.
• Take on new unification bets with a customer who will use them and give feedback.
• Own the developer experience for everyone who uses LiteLLM's Python SDK and proxy.

Skills

Machine Learning

Leadership

Python

Open APIs / LLM APIs

Developer Experience

Team Leadership

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Redis

PostgreSQL

Rust

Job description

LiteLLM is the world’s most popular AI Gateway, trusted by companies like Adobe, Netflix, and NASA. We’ve grown ARR 6x in the last year to nearly $30M with a team of 20, and developers use LiteLLM to call 100+ LLM providers through one API.

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to lead our unified API team and make sure every new model and provider works with LiteLLM on day one.

About the role

This is a hands-on technical lead role. You'll own how LiteLLM unifies LLM APIs across the OpenAI and Anthropic specs, lead the engineers who build it, and set the bar for what good looks like.

Every week a provider ships something new: a new API, a new modality, a new feature. The promise of LiteLLM is that it works with all of them on day one. Your job is to keep that promise: new endpoints ship on day one, open source translation issues go down, and developers can count on LiteLLM to keep up.

You’ll lead our open source pod, where most issues are LLM translation issues. You’ll report to the CEO, and later to our Head of Engineering. This role is in person in San Francisco. We help with relocation and support H-1B transfers.

Responsibilities

• Lead the unified API team and own new model, endpoint, and provider rollouts end to end.

• Design provider-agnostic features at the gateway level, such as session management for non-OpenAI models.

• Triage open source issues and outside PRs (new providers, translation fixes) and get them merged, reviewed, or replaced with an internal fix.

• Review the AI team's PRs and hold a high bar for code quality, including code written with AI.

• Find the power users in your area and use what they need to decide what to build next.

• Take on new unification bets with a customer who will use them and give feedback.

• Own the developer experience for everyone who uses LiteLLM's Python SDK and proxy.

What is our tech stack

The tech stack includes Python, FastAPI, Redis, Postgres. We're moving the gateway to Rust.

What we're looking for

• You've been a machine learning engineer and now build applied AI products.

• 3+ years of experience. The scope you've owned matters more than a Staff title.

• Deep expertise in LLM APIs. You can speak to the differences between /chat/completions and /responses, and to each provider's nuances.

• Experience building or maintaining a unified API that sits in front of many providers.

• Taste in developer experience. You can tell when an API or playground is bad and explain why.

• Customer empathy. You ask why a user wants something and how big the use case is before you build it.

• Ready to lead a team from day one and set the technical bar yourself.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python.

Bonus points

• Experience at a company built on a unified API, such as OpenRouter, Vercel AI SDK, Merge, Segment, or Fivetran.

• You've built your own unified API or written about what a good one should do.

• You've built evals for LLMs.

• You've used LiteLLM in production.

• Open source contributions, especially to LLM tooling.

Why join LiteLLM?

• Work directly with the founders every day.

• Lead the team behind the core of the product: the unified API thousands of engineering teams depend on.

• Own a whole area of the product. We don't have PMs: engineers talk to customers and decide what to build.

• Your work ships in open source, used by engineering teams around the world.

• Move incredibly fast and see your work in production immediately.

• Competitive salary, equity, health, dental, and vision benefits.

About LiteLLM

LiteLLM is the world's most widely adopted AI Gateway. We provide a unified API for 100+ LLM providers along with routing, authentication, budgets, observability, and governance for production AI systems. Thousands of companies rely on LiteLLM to power AI in production.

If you want to lead the team that keeps LiteLLM ahead of every model launch, we'd love to meet you.