Staff AI Engineer

Robots & Pencils is hiring a Staff AI Engineer to build agentic learning systems designed to enable human-centered learning in the Age of AI. This is not a greenfield project. You'll be joining a mature, production environment with real users. You'll own the AI stack end-to-end: building production LLM applications including RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, embeddings, streaming LLM responses, and evaluation frameworks.

What you'll do:

• Build and ship production LLM features: RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, embeddings, streaming responses, and evaluation frameworks.
• Support development and maintenance of workflows using orchestration tools (e.g., Sequencer / workflow engines, state machines).
• Work with vector databases (OpenSearch) for semantic search and retrieval.
• Own AI quality: evaluation, synthetic AI testing, observability, and token cost optimization.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code) to move fast.

Backend stack includes Python, Node.js, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions, and OpenSearch for vector search.

Requirements:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong Python and Node.js proficiency.
• Deep AWS expertise (Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions).
• Hands-on experience building production LLM applications: RAG, multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, prompt engineering, embeddings, vector databases.
• Fullstack development and production environment experience.
• Docker containerization.

Nice to have: Langfuse, synthetic AI testing, token cost optimization, Step Functions for AI workflows.