[Hiring] VP – Distinguished Engineer of Generative AI Engineering @Slate Auto

Role Description

As Distinguished Engineer of Generative AI, you are the founding technical authority for AI at Slate. You will help envision, design, and ship the GenAI platform for Slate.Auto, write code, and make architectural decisions that carry long-term consequence.

• Design and own the end-to-end GenAI platform: context layer, data layer, model serving, agent frameworks, and evaluation pipelines.
• Build Industry-Leading AI Systems.
• Drive Physical AI Across the Vehicle Program.
• Build Slate's Proprietary Data and Context Layer.
• Ship Agentic Systems Across the Company.
• Lead by Building.
• Set the Engineering Standard.
• Hands-on.
• An architect at scale.
• A Physical AI practitioner (preferred).
• GenAI native.
• Technically credible at the architecture level.
• Comfortable in a resource-constrained environment.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years shipping production GenAI systems and 7+ years in a senior technical leadership role.
• BS required. MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or a related field preferred.
• Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and open-source model deployment at production scale.
• Experience designing and deploying multi-agent systems in production.
• Deploying AI systems that operate on physical hardware.
• Computer vision systems for manufacturing quality assurance.
• Closed-loop learning systems where model behavior is updated based on physical world outcomes.
• Familiarity with physical simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or similar).
• Data architecture for AI at scale.
• Cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure at the architecture level.
• Security and compliance architecture for AI systems handling proprietary manufacturing IP.
• Platform engineering practices that make GenAI accessible and reliable for internal teams.

Requirements

• Exceptional track record beats pedigree.
• Candidates without advanced degrees who have published, built widely-adopted systems, or otherwise demonstrated research-level thinking through their work will be evaluated accordingly.
• Fine-tuning and training purpose-built models for domain-specific tasks.
• Evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and observability pipelines for GenAI in production.
• Designing real-time inference pipelines with hard latency constraints.
• Multi-tenant model serving architectures with cost isolation, quota management, and workload prioritization.

Benefits

• Total Base Pay Range: $222,431.00 - $370,719.00.
• Slate offers a wide range of competitive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability insurance, vacation, and 401k.
• The successful candidate may also be eligible to participate in the equity program and/or a discretionary annual incentive program.

Company Description

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization.

• Safety First
• Delight Customers
• One Team
• Relentless Improvement
• Fast, Frugal, and Scrappy
• Respectful Collaboration
• Positive Legacy