Senior AI Engineer (Inference & Agent Systems) – New York or San Francisco / Hybrid – AI Infrastructure Startup – $175,000 – $250,000 + Equity

A high-growth AI infrastructure startup is hiring a Senior AI Engineer to help build and scale next-generation agentic AI systems powering real-world customer workflows.

This is a highly technical, product-focused engineering role suited for someone who has already shipped AI applications into production environments used daily by paying customers. The team is looking for strong builders with deep hands-on experience designing reliable, scalable LLM systems, not purely academic or research-focused profiles.

You’ll work closely with technical leadership to build production-grade AI infrastructure across inference optimization, orchestration, observability, evaluation pipelines, and multi-agent systems.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Drive inference optimization initiatives to reduce latency and improve production performance across multi-step agent pipelines.
• Design and implement scalable Plan-Execute-Synthesize agent workflows.
• Build robust orchestration systems with retries, failure recovery, and workflow resilience.
• Own evaluation frameworks end-to-end, including automated scoring systems and regression detection pipelines.
• Integrate state-of-the-art foundation models into production AI systems.
• Develop observability tooling to trace prompts, tool calls, synthesis steps, and system reliability.
• Work directly with leadership and engineering teams on architecture and product direction.
• Help scale highly reliable AI infrastructure operating in production customer environments.

What They’re Looking For

• 3–7 years of software engineering or AI engineering experience.
• Proven experience shipping AI applications used by real customers in production.
• Strong experience building end-to-end LLM systems and agentic workflows.
• Deep understanding of inference optimization, orchestration, and evaluation pipelines.
• Hands-on engineering mindset with strong ownership and execution capabilities.
• Experience operating within high-growth startup or Series A+ environments.
• Strong Python or Go experience.
• Experience with distributed systems, observability, and production reliability.
• Ability to work in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

Strongly Preferred Backgrounds

• AI infrastructure startups
• Production LLM / agent systems
• FinTech or regulated data environments
• Companies with strong product-market fit
• Engineers with long-term ownership and product delivery experience
• Candidates with demonstrated scale, reliability, and observability expertise

What the Team Values

The hiring team is specifically looking for experienced builders who can own systems end-to-end inside a high-performance engineering environment. They are prioritising candidates with:

• Proven production AI experience over academic credentials
• Strong IC execution and systems ownership
• Stable tenure at product-driven companies
• Experience operating under real-world production constraints
• Ability to build resilient systems around LLM non-determinism

Why Join?

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure and agent systems
• High ownership and visibility across the engineering organisation
• Direct collaboration with senior technical leadership
• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity
• Strong investor backing and rapid growth trajectory
• Chance to build systems used daily by institutional customers

How Do You Apply? 

If you are interested in applying for the Senior AI engineer role, please do so via the link on this page or contact Digital Republic on the phone or by email.

Get in contact with Digital Republic Talent by sending an email to [email protected]. Check out the website on www.digitalrepublictalent.com. You can also find out more on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook.