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Foodsmart is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to own the architecture and implementation of distributed, high-scale backend systems and APIs that serve machine learning models in production. You will lead technical design for AI integration across product lines, enabling real-time and batch inference workflows using LLMs, transformers, and classification models. You'll drive the fine-tuning and deployment of pre-trained models (e.g., from Hugging Face or OpenAI) for mission-critical business use cases in domains such as healthcare, finance, or operations.
You will integrate external AI services where appropriate and evaluate trade-offs for build vs. buy decisions. A key part of this role is defining and evolving platform-wide standards for backend engineering, MLOps, model governance, and observability. You'll mentor and support senior and mid-level engineers, both within your team and across functions, to elevate system design and code quality.
Collaboration is central: you'll work with cross-functional leaders in product, ML research, data engineering, and DevOps to align technical initiatives with business goals. You'll influence AI strategy and roadmap, evaluating emerging technologies and frameworks for future adoption. You'll also lead root-cause analyses and performance tuning to ensure systems remain reliable, efficient, and scalable.
You are a senior technical leader with a demonstrated ability to architect, build, and scale AI-backed systems in production environments. You're comfortable operating across layers—from backend API services to AI Services and ML model lifecycle management—while driving architectural clarity and system-level thinking. You excel at bridging the gap between research and production, with a strong focus on reliability, maintainability, and business outcomes. You're skilled at leading cross-team initiatives, guiding technical direction, and fostering a high-trust engineering culture. You can influence without authority, collaborating across teams to align on complex technical trade-offs. You're deeply invested in engineering excellence, with a strong bias toward automation, observability, and security.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years at the Staff Engineer level or equivalent
- 4+ years of experience with backend development in TypeScript, Node.js, and SQL-based RDBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- 1+ years deploying ML/AI models to production, with hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs or transformer-based models
- Deep understanding of system architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and scalable API design
- Strong experience with Data Pipeline tooling (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, dbt, Dagster) and model deployment practices
- Proven leadership in setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team projects to completion
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
