Sr. Product Engineer, AI Systems

Employ • Austin, TX

9d

About The Position

In this senior-level role, you will lead the architecture and evolution of AI-powered systems that transform probabilistic model outputs into reliable, production-grade product capabilities. You will design and ship systems around agents, retrieval pipelines, orchestration layers, and evaluation frameworks, while defining the architectural standards that ensure AI-driven features operate safely and at scale across our platform.
This is not a feature-delivery role — it is a systems-definition role. Your decisions will shape how AI capabilities are built, evaluated, and deployed across the organization.
About the Team:
Our AI Foundations team is building the foundation for how AI will power the next generation of products at Employ. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy team responsible for turning rapidly evolving model capabilities into reliable, customer-facing systems.

Requirements

• 4+ years building AI-augmented product capabilities (LLMs, RAG systems, agents, orchestration frameworks).
• Event-Driven & Asynchronous Systems : Experience designing decoupled systems using queues such as Kafka, SQS, or BullMQ, and implementing asynchronous workflows that prevent blocking operations in user-facing systems.
• State Management Strategy : Experience persisting state across sessions, managing context windows efficiently, and handling concurrency and race conditions when multiple agents interact with shared data.
• Structured Data Enforcement : Experience enforcing structured outputs using schema validation tools such as Pydantic, Zod, or JSON Schema to ensure AI-generated outputs are reliable and machine-readable.
• API Design & Integration : Strong understanding of REST, GraphQL, or RPC interface design, along with authentication, rate limiting, and idempotent API patterns.

Responsibilities

• Architect & Ship AI-Native Systems
• Lead the architecture and delivery of end-to-end AI-powered systems, including agents, RAG pipelines, orchestration layers, and reasoning workflows.
• Translate product vision into scalable technical systems.
• Define contracts, state management strategies, and guardrails for AI-driven workflows.
• Own and evolve API contracts that AI systems interact with, ensuring reliability, idempotency, authentication safety, and rate limiting.
• Engineer Reliability at Scale
• Design schema enforcement and validation layers for AI-generated outputs.
• Implement retries, fallback strategies, and failure-mode containment.
• Establish evaluation frameworks for benchmarking, regression testing, and drift detection.
• Create observability standards for AI systems, including structured logging, telemetry, tracing, and performance monitoring.
• Productionize experimental AI capabilities into scalable, secure services.
• Set Direction & Elevate the Organization
• Establish architectural patterns and standards adopted across teams.
• Mentor engineers in AI-native and spec-driven development practices.
• Influence engineering culture through clarity, urgency, and execution.
• Decompose high-level business outcomes into executable technical systems.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO: Trust-based time off so you can recharge and bring your best self to work.
• Comprehensive benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage to support you and your family’s health and well-being.
• Learning & development programs: Access to training, mentorship, and development resources to grow your skills — from HR operations to total rewards strategy.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed