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Salary: USD 200,000 - 275,000 / annual
Via Transportation is launching AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating as a startup within the company, to expand beyond transit into AI-powered solutions for cities. As a Staff Engineer, you'll be a founding member of this new division, with rare autonomy and direct access to leadership while backed by a company already at scale.
You'll own the full lifecycle of AI product development—from problem framing and data pipeline design through production deployment and iteration in live environments. Working in a forward-deployed model, you'll collaborate closely with city partners to understand their constraints and rapidly iterate on scalable agentic solutions. You'll lead technical scoping workshops with city leaders, translating complex local problems into AI-driven workflows.
Your technical scope spans the full AI stack: you'll design and build production-grade backend systems powering AI features, including APIs, data flows, and distributed systems that perform reliably at scale. You'll contribute to intelligent tooling involving data consolidation, predictive modeling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences. Cross-functional collaboration with product, data science, and operations teams will help identify and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across the business.
Beyond execution, you'll help shape AI Labs' technical culture from the ground up—establishing how the team builds, reviews, ships, and iterates. You'll stay close to the frontier of AI development and proactively bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team.
You bring 10+ years of hands-on full-stack application development with a track record of owning features end-to-end, plus 3+ years working with AI tools or building AI-powered products. You have deep expertise across the AI stack—LLMs, predictive modeling, and data infrastructure for real-world environments. You're a strong core engineer comfortable with scalable API design, distributed systems, and clean, maintainable code. You thrive in ambiguity and early-stage environments, taking ownership without being asked. You communicate effectively cross-functionally, bring intellectual curiosity, and are comfortable traveling to collaborate on-site with partners.
