Staff / Senior Engineer(AI lab) with Early Stage/ Startup/Founder Exp)

Own the technical architecture: agent orchestration, process mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems

Architect compound AI systems running inside Fortune 5000 environments: multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance

Set the engineering pace. Varick ships to production weekly, not quarterly. Drive velocity, cut scope ruthlessly.

Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers. Set code review standards, establish processes, and build a team that scales from 5 to 50.

Bridge research and production: stay current on foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, long-context reasoning, and translate what's useful into production systems

Strong signal of exceptional technical ability. Years of experience is not a hard filter; recent company quality and demonstrated output are.

Has built and shipped systems at a top AI lab (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta FAIR) OR as a founding or senior engineer at a high-signal AI-native startup

Deep production AI/ML systems experience across the full stack: inference, orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring. Not just fine-tuning notebooks.

Strong systems design instincts: architects for reliability, scale, and iteration speed simultaneously

High agency, recruits well, takes responsibility for outcomes, not just code. Based in SF or willing to relocate. 5 days a week in-person.

Agent systems, compound AI workflows, or LLM-powered applications in production

Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise integration

Infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture

Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup

Published research or significant open-source contributions in AI/ML