Staff AI Engineer
Staff AI Engineer USA (Remote) with 20% Travel. At Robots & Pencils, we build meaningful, scalable digital products that solve real business problems. We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer to support the development and delivery of complex, integration-heavy platforms. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives in hands-on development, can confidently own features and deployments, and contributes to team leadership within a pod. In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team, building across the stack while helping guide delivery, improve systems, and solve challenging integration problems, including AI-native platforms such as 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, where reliability, performance, and scalability are critical. You’ll collaborate closely with senior engineers to enhance existing systems and deliver high-quality features. By joining us, you leverage our Advanced AWS Partnership and the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of 190,000. What You’ll Do Development Build and maintain backend services using Python and Node.js, including serverless architectures (e.g., AWS Lambda, API Gateway)
- Develop and integrate APIs that support frontend applications and external systems
- Contribute to frontend features and ensure smooth integration across the stack
- Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code with strong unit testing practices
Workflow & System Orchestration Support the development and maintenance of workflows using orchestration tools (e.g., Sequencer / workflow engines, state machines)
- Contribute to event-driven processes and asynchronous system operations (e.g., SQS,EventBridge)
- Assist in improving reliability through better error handling and retries
Backend & API Engineering Develop RESTful APIs and support the BE architecture
- Integrate with third-party services and internal systems, including AI-driven platforms
- Assist in optimizing performance and scalability of services using DynamoDB single-table design patterns (composite keys, transactional writes)
- Implement secure and reliable data handling practices
System Reliability & Support Troubleshoot issues in production environments with guidance from senior team members
- Contribute to logging, monitoring, and debugging efforts
- Support deployment and release processes in cloud-native environments (AWS, Docker)
Collaboration & Growth Work closely with cross-functional teams across global locations •Participate in code reviews and team discussions
- Take ownership of assigned features and tasks, delivering end-to-end solutions
- Continue developing technical skills and leveraging AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code)
Required Skills & Experience 6+years of professional software engineering
- Strong experience with Python and Node.js
- Experience with LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, vector databases (OpenSearch), embeddings, streaming LLM responses, RAG concepts.
Experience working with AWS cloud environments, including Lambda, DynamoDB (and Single-Table design), S3, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions, etc. Experience building and maintaining fullstack applications
- Exposure to workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Sequencer or similar systems)
- Solid understanding of API design and backend systems
- Familiarity with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL, including scalable design patterns)
- Experience working in production environments
- Strong unit testing practices and maintainable test strategies
- Experience with containerization (e.g., Docker)
Nice to Have
Demonstrated ability to reason about system-wide impacts of changes, including downstream effects across services and data layers. Demonstrated ability to identify design gaps in requirements and raise them before they reach development. Experience with Langfuse, synthetic AI testing, token cost optimization, reasoning effort configuration, Step Functions for AI workflows.