Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

$235,000–$285,000 base + equity

New York City (onsite)

We're partnering with a fast-growing, venture-backed AI startup building intelligent systems to transform complex, data-intensive investigations.

With strong commercial traction, growing enterprise adoption, and significant technical challenges ahead, the company is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of production AI agents and model adaptation systems.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with ownership across LLM fine-tuning, agent architecture, evaluation, and inference infrastructure.

What You'll Do

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• Own model strategy, balancing frontier and open-weight LLMs across accuracy, latency, and cost.
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• Fine-tune and adapt open-weight models using LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, and preference optimization.
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• Design and deploy production AI agents with tool use, orchestration, and structured outputs.
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• Build evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, reliability, and hallucinations.
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• Turn real-world user feedback and production traces into training data and continuous model improvements.
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• Optimize model serving, inference performance, batching, and quantization.
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• Drive technical architecture, mentor engineers, and remain hands-on in code.
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What You'll Bring

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• Strong background in applied AI, machine learning, or software engineering.
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• Proven experience fine-tuning LLMs and deploying adapted models in production.
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• Experience building production-grade AI agents and evaluation pipelines.
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• Strong Python and PyTorch skills.
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• Familiarity with Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, or similar frameworks.
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• Understanding of LLM inference, model serving, observability, and cost optimization.
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• Ability to lead technical decisions and solve ambiguous engineering challenges.
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Tech Stack

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• Python, PyTorch
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• Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray
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• LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, preference optimization
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• LLM agents, tool calling, orchestration
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• Model serving, quantization, inference optimization
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• LLM evaluation, observability, and guardrails
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Why Join?

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• Own the technical direction of AI agents and model adaptation at a growing startup.
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• Work on challenging, real-world AI problems with proprietary data and direct customer feedback.
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• Build and deploy sophisticated AI systems beyond proof-of-concept.
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• Join a venture-backed, high-performing engineering team with strong commercial momentum.
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• Receive meaningful equity and have a direct impact on product and company growth.
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About People In AI

People In AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI and Machine Learning talent with companies building the next generation of intelligent technology.

Interested? Get in touch to learn more.