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Salary: USD 200,000 - 275,000 / annual
Via is a leading transportation technology platform serving hundreds of agency partners globally, transforming public transit systems into smart, data-driven networks. The company is launching AI Labs—an incubator-style team operating like a startup within the organization—to expand beyond transit and deliver cutting-edge AI solutions to cities.
As a Staff Engineer in AI Labs, you'll be a founding member of this new initiative with rare autonomy and direct access to leadership. You'll build and ship production-grade AI products end-to-end, owning everything from problem framing and data pipeline design through deployment and iteration in live environments.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and deploying end-to-end AI products with full ownership across the stack
- Working in a forward-deployed manner with city partners to understand problems deeply and iterate quickly on agentic solutions
- Leading technical scoping workshops with city leaders to solve complex local problems using agentic workflows
- Contributing to a varied roadmap involving data consolidation, predictive modeling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences
- Collaborating with product, data science, and operations teams to identify high-impact AI opportunities
- Writing clean, scalable backend code that powers AI-driven features—designing APIs, managing data flows, and ensuring reliable performance at scale
- Shaping the technical culture of AI Labs from the ground up
- Staying current with frontier AI developments and bringing new ideas and tools to the team
You bring 10+ years of hands-on full-stack application development with a track record of owning features end-to-end. You have 3+ years working with AI tools and building AI-powered products, with deep expertise across the AI stack including LLMs, predictive modeling, and supporting data infrastructure. You're a strong core engineer comfortable with scalable API design, distributed systems, and maintainable code. You thrive in ambiguity and early-stage environments, taking ownership proactively. You communicate effectively cross-functionally, are intellectually curious about AI possibilities, and enjoy working directly with users and customers. Travel for on-site collaboration is expected.
