Staff AI Engineer at Robots and Pencils
Houston, TX
$177,375–$209,625from the description
Aug 10, 2026
Houston, TX
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Staff AI Engineer role at a consultancy that ships production AI systems for enterprise clients, with a 50% onsite requirement in Houston. The engineer will own end-to-end architecture and delivery of agentic and generative AI systems — including RAG pipelines, LLM evaluation frameworks, and ML platforms — while setting engineering standards and mentoring junior engineers. The role suits a deeply hands-on technical leader with a strong production ML background and experience across the full AI development lifecycle.
Staff level · 7+ years · Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 50 people in the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 10–75
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 $132,286 (middle half $103,415–$162,956). 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 Aug 13, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is 50% onsite in Houston and 50% remote — it does not qualify as fully remote.
The JD requires 7+ years of overall software engineering experience with 4+ years specifically in production AI/ML systems; the 7-year figure is used as the overall years minimum, with the 4-year AI/ML sub-requirement captured contextually.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role centers on building and shipping AI/ML software systems (pointing to 15-1252 Software Developers), but the depth of ML modeling, generative AI, and data-science-adjacent work (RAG, embeddings, model optimization) also fits 15-2051 Data Scientists. 15-1252 was chosen because the primary deliverable is production software systems, not statistical modeling or research.
Claude Code and Cursor are listed as a single requirement ('such as Claude Code and Cursor'); Claude Code is used as the primary name with Cursor in alternatives, as both are explicitly named AI-forward coding tools the candidate must use daily.
'AI orchestration frameworks' is extracted from 'mastery of AI frameworks and orchestration tools' — no specific product is named in the posting.
The salary range ($177,375–$209,625) is stated as a possible range at time of posting and may be adjusted; the posting notes final pay may differ.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): API design.
Read the full posting
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