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Beacon AI is building an AI platform to make flying safer, more efficient, and more capable. The company is backed by top investors, has secured a dozen Department of Defense contracts, and partners with major airlines to deliver mission-critical systems.
As a Senior Software Engineer specializing in AI/LLM, you will ship LLM-powered product features end-to-end. This includes designing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and tool-calling flows, writing the services that run them, building evaluations and guardrails, and monitoring cost, latency, and quality in production. You'll partner with ML/infrastructure teammates on embeddings, indexing, and model hosting, and with product teams on user experience and outcomes.
Key responsibilities:
**Build user-facing LLM features:** Design and implement RAG and tool-calling flows using frameworks like LangChain. Deliver robust JSON and schema-bound outputs with validation, retries, and fallbacks. Add function calling to integrate with internal tools, search, routing, and data services.
**Own the service layer:** Ship APIs and workers in Python or TypeScript with clear contracts, streaming, and backoff logic. Add caching, request shaping, prompt templates, and context packing to control latency and cost. Integrate with AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, or self-hosted endpoints.
**Retrieval and data prep:** Collaborate with infrastructure teams to develop chunking, embeddings, and indexing capabilities for documents, time series, and multimedia. Choose and tune vector backends such as OpenSearch, pgvector, or Pinecone. Keep knowledge bases fresh with data syncs from S3, Aurora, DynamoDB, and external sources.
**Evaluation and quality:** Create offline evals and golden sets for prompts, retrievers, and tools. Stand up online metrics for task success, hallucination rate, retrieval precision/recall, p95 latency, and cost per request. Run A/B tests and prompt/version rollouts with guardrails and canaries.
**Safety, privacy, and compliance:** Implement content and policy checks, PII detection and redaction, access controls, and auditing. Design human-in-the-loop paths for sensitive actions. Handle aviation data with care and follow internal security standards.
**Operate what you build:** Add tracing, logs, and dashboards for model calls, token usage, errors, and saturation. Debug failures across retrieval, prompts, tools, and providers.
The role is hybrid based in San Carlos, CA, with 3+ days per week onsite.
**Requirements:**
- 5–8 years of experience, including production ML/LLM systems work
- Shipped LLM apps and improved them with data
- Strong production coding, testing, and documentation skills
- Deep understanding of embeddings, chunking, vector search tradeoffs, and function calling
- Quality mindset: design evals, define success metrics, iterate based on evidence
- Cost and latency awareness; ability to track p95 and hit SLAs
- Clear communication and ability to align partners across product, infrastructure, and security
- Ownership capability: take features from design through production with minimal oversight
**Nice to have:**
- Experience with Bedrock, OpenSearch Serverless, pgvector, Pinecone, or Weaviate
- Prompt versioning, guardrails, and provider routing in production
- Multimodal work with time series or video
- Familiarity with GPU inference, Triton, or TensorRT-LLM
- Aviation or other safety-critical domain exposure
- DevOps basics for CI/CD, IaC, and secure secrets handling
Note: Due to U.S. export control regulations, only U.S. Persons (U.S. citizens, Green Card holders, lawful permanent residents, or individuals granted asylum or refugee status) can be hired. No visa sponsorship or support for visa transfers. All work must be performed in the United States.
