[Hiring] Staff AI Engineer @Orbitshift.ai

Role Description

This is a remote position.

We are looking for a Staff AI Engineer to be our internal authority on applied AI, the person who sets technical direction on what we build with AI, not just how. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone with staff-level impact in applied AI, backed by solid backend engineering depth.

You will be our go-to person for everything AI, effectively a Tech Fellow for AI within the org. You'll own the AI technical strategy, translate business problems into AI system designs, decide which models and approaches fit each use case, and own the judgment calls that make GenAI systems reliable and cost-effective in production. Just as importantly, you'll know and argue when not to use AI.

This is a hands-on staff-level IC role with real influence over the AI roadmap and how the whole team builds with AI. You'll pair deep GenAI application experience with solid backend engineering, so your designs hold up in production and not just in a notebook. We care more about depth in fundamentals, scope of impact, and judgment than familiarity with any specific tool.

Qualifications

• B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science or a related field, preferably from a reputed institute (IIT, BITS, NIT, or equivalent).
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with staff-level impact: technical influence and standard-setting that extends well beyond your own work.
• A strong backend and distributed-systems foundation.
• 2–3+ years hands-on building GenAI applications, having used LLMs extensively across a range of use cases.
• Strong conceptual grasp of agentic flows and long-running agents.
• Demonstrated judgment on model selection and quality-vs-cost-vs-latency trade-offs.
• Production experience with eval, observability, guardrails, and cost control for LLM systems.
• Current, active awareness of AI research and model releases.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills.

Requirements

• Set AI technical direction and strategy.
• Own the AI technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmap across the org.
• Set the standards, patterns, and guardrails other engineers build against.
• Be the internal authority on AI: translate ambiguous business problems into concrete AI system designs.
• Drive org-level build/buy and model/vendor decisions.
• Select the right model for each use case and balance output quality against cost and latency.
• Track the field closely, papers, model releases, tooling.
• Design and build across the GenAI stack.
• Reason clearly about agentic flows and long-running, autonomous agents.
• Own production judgment: eval pipelines, observability for LLM and agent systems.
• Bring strong backend and distributed-systems depth to bear.
• Operate on a modern cloud and data stack: AWS, containerization, relational databases.
• Work closely with product, design, and the founding team.
• Translate complex AI concepts for non-technical audiences.

Benefits

• Own the AI direction at a fast-growing startup.
• Direct line to the founding team and a seat in the decisions that shape the product and the org.
• Work alongside a world-class team: engineers and operators from Amazon, McKinsey, IIT, and Stanford.
• A fast growth curve, strong ownership, and competitive compensation with equity.