Staff Engineer, AI & Core Systems

FDE Team; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

FDE Team is hiring a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff (MTS) to design, build, and scale sophisticated software and AI systems in a hands-on capacity. You will own backend services, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities, delivering production-grade AI applications.

You’ll work on ambiguous problems, making architectural decisions and driving end-to-end development with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and observability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with ownership of production systems.
• Strong hands-on programming experience with Python, Go, Java, C++, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, databases, and system design.
• Experience architecting and operating scalable, resilient production systems.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML, LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, agentic systems, or production AI applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable production software and AI systems.
• Own complex engineering initiatives from 0→1 through production and scale.
• Architect backend services, APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities.
• Build production applications using Python and other modern programming languages.
• Develop and integrate LLM, RAG, agentic AI, retrieval, and intelligent workflow capabilities.
• Design systems for reliability, scalability, security, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Work with structured and unstructured data across modern databases, retrieval systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Build evaluation, monitoring, testing, and quality frameworks for production AI systems.
• Investigate difficult performance, reliability, data, and infrastructure problems.
• Make architectural decisions while balancing speed, technical quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Rapidly prototype new capabilities and turn successful experiments into reliable production systems.
• Work closely with other senior engineers, product stakeholders, and customer engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers and help establish strong engineering standards without moving away from hands-on development.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

TypeScript

Distributed systems

Education

CS/Engineering/Math degree

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS

Azure

GCP

LLM tooling

Job description

FDE Team is hiring a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff (MTS) to design, build, and scale sophisticated software and AI systems in a hands-on capacity. You will own backend services, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities, delivering production-grade AI applications.

You’ll work on ambiguous problems, making architectural decisions and driving end-to-end development with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and observability.