Staff AI Engineer at Robots and Pencils
$177,375–$209,625from the description
Jul 14, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role focused on architecting and delivering production AI/ML systems end-to-end, from research through deployment, within a consultancy that ships enterprise AI products on tight timelines. The work spans building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, ML platforms, and observability tooling, while also setting engineering standards and mentoring less experienced engineers. Suited to a seasoned ML engineer with strong cloud and generative AI production experience who is comfortable leading technical decisions across cross-functional teams.
Staff level · 7+ years · Remote
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 3,650 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 750–5,500
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The JD requires 7+ years of total software engineering experience with 4+ years specifically in AI/ML production systems; the overall years minimum is set to 7 (the overall floor), and the 4-year AI/ML sub-requirement is captured in context.
Python is listed with 'or similar' — the JD clearly gates on expert software engineering proficiency in a general-purpose language, but Python is the named primary; no specific alternative language is named.
AWS is explicitly called out with 'in-depth understanding of AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings'; treated as a hard gate rather than a generic cloud requirement.
'AI frameworks and orchestration tools' and 'evaluation frameworks and observability tools for LLM apps' are required but no specific product names are given beyond Claude and Cursor; LLM observability is emitted as the canonical skill for the latter.
Claude Code and Cursor are explicitly named as required day-to-day tools under the requirements block.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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