Staff Engineer / AI Builder

Job Overview

We’re looking for a Staff AI Builder to lead the design and delivery of AI/ML systems. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives on architectural decisions, can confidently own systems end-to-end, and contributes to technical leadership across the team.

Why This Role Matters

At Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate. Every role here contributes directly to that mission.

What You'll Do

Agentic & GenAI Engineering

• Design and build agentic workflows — reasoning loops, tool/function calling, and orchestration across single- and multi-agent architectures.
• Build and maintain RAG pipelines: chunking strategy, embeddings, vector search (OpenSearch), re-ranking, and staleness/refresh handling for dynamic knowledge sources.
• Integrate with AWS Bedrock and Agent Core, including MCP-based tool design.
• Write and iterate on production system prompts — structured role framing, output constraints, and few-shot design.
• Build eval and observability into every agent you ship: golden datasets, RAGAS-style metrics, LLM-as-judge, and tracing via LangFuse/LangSmith or equivalent.
• Design for LLM failure, not just LLM success.

Full-Stack & Platform Engineering

• Build backend services in Python and Node.js, including serverless architectures (AWS Lambda, API Gateway).
• Design DynamoDB single-table schemas for conversation state, agent memory, and session history.
• Support event-driven orchestration for asynchronous agent operations.
• Contribute to frontend integration points so agentic features land cleanly for end users.
• Support deployment, monitoring, and production troubleshooting in cloud-native environments.

Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Bring informed technical judgment to architecture discussions.
• Partner with product, design, and delivery leads across global teams.
• Mentor other engineers on the pod and help raise the bar on agentic engineering practices.
• Own assigned features and releases end-to-end.

What You'll Bring

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Real, hands-on depth in agentic AI.
• Practical RAG expertise.
• Experience building evaluation and observability for LLM systems.
• Strong prompt engineering skills.
• Hands-on experience with the AWS GenAI stack.
• Strong Python and Node.js skills.
• Solid understanding of production reliability patterns for LLM-backed systems.
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and cloud-native deployment.

Helpful Extras and Unique Skills

• Direct experience with Amazon Bedrock Agent Core.
• Experience in a regulated or high-stakes domain.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools.
• A point of view on LLM observability tooling.