Staff AI Engineer

Harnham is a rapidly growing team seeking a Staff AI Engineer to architect, build, and scale intelligent systems for next-generation platform capabilities. This high-impact role will involve leading the design and ownership of production AI systems, establishing foundational AI architecture, and serving as a technical authority across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and end-to-end ownership of production AI systems, including LLM pipelines, RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, reranking, and orchestration
• Establish foundational AI architecture and influence how intelligent systems are built, evaluated, and deployed
• Create evaluation frameworks that measure retrieval quality, reasoning accuracy, workflow performance, and system reliability
• Develop internal tooling that supports rapid experimentation without compromising safety or stability
• Serve as the technical authority across teams for AI quality, observability, safety guardrails, and operational excellence

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on ML/AI systems
• Demonstrated ownership of LLM‑powered solutions in production environments
• Deep experience with RAG, embeddings, reranking, and vector stores (e.g., Pinecone, FAISS, Chroma)
• Strong proficiency in Python; familiarity with TypeScript a plus
• Ability to structure and solve ambiguous, high‑stakes technical problems using evidence‑driven decision‑making
• Excellent communication skills and comfort collaborating with cross‑functional teams
• Background in compliance, security, or other regulated industries
• Experience with Snowflake or enterprise data platforms
• Familiarity with orchestration systems such as Temporal or Airflow
• Experience with LLM evaluation platforms (e.g., Braintrust)
• Contributions to technical communities or published work