Special Projects - OCTO

Special Projects (Office of the CTO), Staff AI Engineer

About the Role:

We're seeking an exceptional Staff AI Engineer to join our Office of the CTO's Special Projects team. This is a unique opportunity to work at the leading edge of AI research and development, building and iterating on cutting-edge AI agents and models that will shape our company's product vision and strategic direction. As a staff-level technical leader, you'll not only push the boundaries of what's possible with AI, but also set technical direction, influence architecture decisions across the organization, and mentor engineering teams. You'll have the freedom to explore emerging AI capabilities, prototype innovative solutions, and identify transformative opportunities for AI integration across our enterprise software platform.

What You'll Do:

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define technical vision and architecture for next-generation AI capabilities across the company
• Drive AI strategy discussions with the CTO and executive leadership, translating technical possibilities into business opportunities
• Set standards and best practices for AI development that influence teams organization-wide
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams and product areas

Research & Innovation

• Design, build, and rapidly iterate on experimental AI agents and models to explore state-of-the-art capabilities
• Evaluate emerging AI research, architectures, and techniques for potential integration into our product ecosystem
• Translate cutting-edge research papers into practical implementations and proof-of-concepts
• Stay current with ML research publications and identify opportunities for competitive advantage
• Establish evaluation methodologies and frameworks that become company standards

Infrastructure & Systems

• Architect enterprise-scale ML infrastructure for LLM training, evaluation, and deployment
• Build robust evaluation and monitoring frameworks to measure model performance, safety, and business impact
• Design for scalability from prototype to production, ensuring systems can handle enterprise workloads
• Optimize inference latency and resource efficiency for production AI systems
• Develop reusable abstractions and tools that accelerate AI development across the organization
• Make critical technical decisions on infrastructure, tooling, and platform choices

Technical Development

• Architect production-quality AI systems including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and multi-modal applications
• Build scalable microservices and data pipelines to support AI experimentation and deployment
• Integrate AI capabilities with existing enterprise systems, APIs, and data architectures
• Solve the most complex technical challenges that other engineers escalate

Strategic Impact & Influence

• Partner with the CTO and senior leadership as a trusted technical advisor on AI strategy and roadmap
• Work cross-functionally with ML experts, data infrastructure, and product stakeholders to drive alignment on technical direction
• Identify high-impact opportunities where AI can create significant customer value
• Mentor and develop senior and staff engineers across the organization on AI capabilities and best practices
• Represent the company externally through technical talks, blog posts, or industry engagement

What You Bring:

Required Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong fundamentals in system design, algorithms, and data structures
• 5+ years hands-on experience building AI-powered applications using LLMs and modern AI frameworks
• Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives and shipping production AI systems that deliver measurable business value at scale
• Demonstrated experience influencing technical strategy and mentoring senior engineers
• Deep expertise with AI development tools and platforms (LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, vector databases)

Technical Skills

• Expert-level proficiency in Python; experience with TypeScript/JavaScript is a plus
• Strong understanding of prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and agentic AI patterns
• Deep expertise in at least one area: LLM infrastructure, distributed training, inference optimization, or multi-agent systems
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers)
• Familiarity with LLM serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or similar)
• Experience architecting systems for scale, reliability, and performance
• Experience with AI evaluation methodologies, safety considerations, and failure mode analysis
• Comfortable with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization, and modern DevOps practices
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and data pipeline design

Leadership & Impact

• Demonstrated ability to drive technical vision and influence decision-making across multiple teams
• Track record of mentoring and developing engineers at various levels
• Experience leading projects with ambiguous requirements and navigating organizational complexity
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences
• Strategic thinking with ability to balance long-term technical vision with near-term business needs
• Proven ability to build consensus and drive adoption of new technologies and practices

Mindset & Approach

• Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguity and rapidly prototype solutions with incomplete information
• Strong research orientation with ability to consume academic papers and translate to practical applications
• Product thinking with focus on user needs, business value, and real-world impact
• Collaborative communication style with ability to explain complex AI concepts clearly
• Intellectual curiosity and excitement about pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities
• Ownership mentality and willingness to tackle the hardest problems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise software environments and understanding of B2B customer needs
• Deep specialization in one or more AI domains: NLP, computer vision, reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, or LLM infrastructure
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or published technical writing
• Experience with responsible AI practices, model governance, and compliance considerations
• Previous experience in innovation labs, R&D teams, or strategic technical leadership roles
• Experience with ML inference optimization techniques
• Knowledge of distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FSDP, etc.)
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration for ML workloads
• Experience with model quantization, compression, or efficiency techniques

What Makes This Role Unique:

This isn't a traditional engineering role. You'll have:

• Direct partnership with executive leadership and significant influence over company-wide AI strategy
• Freedom to experiment without the constraints of typical product development cycles
• Visibility and impact as your work shapes the future direction of our products
• Small team autonomy with resources to move fast and test bold ideas
• Research time to stay at the forefront of AI developments and explore emerging capabilities
• Technical leadership scope that extends across the entire engineering organization

Our Environment:

We're building a team culture that values intellectual curiosity, rapid experimentation, and thoughtful risk-taking. You'll work alongside other senior engineers who are equally passionate about AI's potential to transform enterprise software. We believe in giving smart people hard problems and the autonomy to solve them. As a staff engineer, you'll be a key technical leader helping shape not just what we build, but how we build it.

Your work will directly impact how our customers experience AI and shape the long-term scalability of our AI capabilities. This role is critical to our company's AI transformation and competitive positioning.

Level & Compensation:

Not sure if this is the right level? Don’t worry—while this role is scoped at L5+, we’re open to candidates at the Senior, Staff, or Principal level based on experience and impact. Our interviews are designed to calibrate level based on experience. Compensation is commensurate to leveling decisions.

Compensation: $200,000 - $330,000