Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer $235,000–$285,000 base + equity New York City (onsite) We're partnering with a fast-growing, venture-backed AI startup building intelligent systems to transform complex, data-intensive investigations.

With strong commercial traction, growing enterprise adoption, and significant technical challenges ahead, the company is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of production AI agents and model adaptation systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with ownership across LLM fine-tuning, agent architecture, evaluation, and inference infrastructure.

What You'll Do

• Own model strategy, balancing frontier and open-weight LLMs across accuracy, latency, and cost.
• Fine-tune and adapt open-weight models using LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, and preference optimization.
• Design and deploy production AI agents with tool use, orchestration, and structured outputs.
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, reliability, and hallucinations.
• Turn real-world user feedback and production traces into training data and continuous model improvements.
• Optimize model serving, inference performance, batching, and quantization.
• Drive technical architecture, mentor engineers, and remain hands-on in code.

What You'll Bring

• Strong background in applied AI, machine learning, or software engineering.
• Proven experience fine-tuning LLMs and deploying adapted models in production.
• Experience building production-grade AI agents and evaluation pipelines.
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills.
• Familiarity with Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, or similar frameworks.
• Understanding of LLM inference, model serving, observability, and cost optimization.
• Ability to lead technical decisions and solve ambiguous engineering challenges.
• Tech Stack Python, PyTorch Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, preference optimization LLM agents, tool calling, orchestration Model serving, quantization, inference optimization LLM evaluation, observability, and guardrails Why Join?
• Own the technical direction of AI agents and model adaptation at a growing startup.
• Work on challenging, real-world AI problems with proprietary data and direct customer feedback.
• Build and deploy sophisticated AI systems beyond proof-of-concept.
• Join a venture-backed, high-performing engineering team with strong commercial momentum.
• Receive meaningful equity and have a direct impact on product and company growth.

About People In AI

People In AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI and Machine Learning talent with companies building the next generation of intelligent technology. Interested? Get in touch to learn more.