Staff Engineer – AI & Agentic Systems (Remote/Hybrid USA) - $220k-$250k+

We are partnering with a high-growth technology business operating within the financial services sector that is investing heavily in AI, automation, and next-generation workflow solutions. They are seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the architecture, design, and delivery of AI-powered and agentic capabilities across their core platform. This is not a research-focused AI position. Instead, the role is aimed at an experienced software engineer who can take large language models, agentic frameworks, and modern AI tooling and turn them into scalable, secure, production-grade products that deliver measurable business value. Working alongside Engineering Leadership, Product, and Design teams, you will help define the firm's AI strategy, establish architectural patterns, and drive the adoption of intelligent automation across complex operational workflows. This is a highly influential role with significant autonomy and visibility across the organisation. Key Responsibilities Agentic Architecture & Platform Design Design and build scalable agentic architectures, orchestration frameworks, and AI-powered workflows. Define how large language models interact with business-critical data and operational processes. Build integrations and services that expose platform capabilities to AI agents and external systems. Develop frameworks for governance, auditability, approval workflows, and human oversight of autonomous actions. Establish scalable architectural patterns that support reliability, maintainability, and future growth. AI Product Development Lead the development of AI-powered capabilities across operational and workflow-driven products. Design and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt orchestration, tool-calling frameworks, and multi-step agent workflows. Build evaluation, testing, monitoring, and observability frameworks for AI-driven features. Own integrations with leading AI providers and define strategies around model selection, performance, resilience, and cost optimisation. Technical Leadership Provide technical leadership and architectural direction across engineering teams. Produce technical specifications, design documentation, and architectural decision records. Mentor engineers on AI engineering practices, prompt engineering, evaluation methodologies, and responsible AI development. Establish standards for deployment, testing, monitoring, governance, and operational support. Evaluate emerging technologies and drive pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions. Cross-Functional Collaboration Partner with Product teams to identify high-impact AI use cases and define delivery roadmaps. Work closely with business stakeholders to understand operational challenges and automation opportunities. Collaborate with Security, Compliance, and Risk teams to ensure solutions meet regulatory and governance requirements Required Experience 8+ years of software engineering experience delivering complex production systems. Proven experience building and deploying AI-powered products into production environments. Strong experience with: Large Language Models (LLMs) Prompt Engineering Tool / Function Calling Agent Orchestration Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI Evaluation & Monitoring Frameworks Strong software engineering fundamentals across: System Architecture Distributed Systems API Design Data Modelling Production Operations Advanced Python development experience. Experience leading technical initiatives spanning multiple teams and business areas. Strong communication skills with the ability to translate business objectives into technical solutions. Preferred Experience Experience building agentic platforms or AI infrastructure in production environments. Hands-on experience building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers or production integrations. Exposure to frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Anthropic tooling, OpenAI tooling, or similar technologies. Experience designing integrations across complex enterprise systems and APIs. Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and containerised environments. Experience within FinTech, payments, accounting technology, financial operations, or other regulated industries. Understanding of AI governance, trust and safety, auditability, and human-in-the-loop design principles. Previous experience operating at Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, or equivalent level. Technology Environment The technology stack includes a modern cloud-native architecture leveraging: Python TypeScript Modern frontend technologies Relational databases Containerised microservices Public cloud infrastructure CI/CD and DevOps tooling AI and agentic development frameworks Show more Show less