Staff AI Engineer
At a glance
Senior AI Engineering role at Machinify. United States · full-time · $210,000–$280,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build LLM products with retrieval, agents, tool use, structured outputs, and multi-step workflows
- Write prompt evaluations and maintain them as code alongside the prompts they assess
- Make foundation models reliable in production with caching, retries, fallbacks, cost controls, monitoring, and safeguards
- Choose among named foundation models, then fine-tune or distill them when prompting falls short
- Shape AI product experiences with product and design, including streaming, confidence cues, and human review
What you bring
- At least three years in software engineering, including a year or more shipping LLM features to production
- Strong Python and TypeScript skills, plus practical knowledge of prompting, function calls, structured output, context, embeddings, and vector search
- You have built and maintained an LLM evaluation suite and can explain the limits of public benchmarks
- Hands-on experience with an orchestration approach and a vector database
Who this fits
This suits a senior engineer who wants to take LLM systems from experimentation into dependable production use, rather than focus on training models from scratch. You’ll work remotely from anywhere in the US and collaborate with product and design.
From the employer
Machinify is a leading healthcare intelligence company with expertise across the payment continuum, delivering unmatched value, transparency, and efficiency to health plan clients across the country. Deployed by over 85 health plans, including many of the top 20, and representing more than 270 million lives, Machinify brings together a fully configurable and content-rich, AI-powered platform along with best-in-class expertise. We’re constantly reimagining what’s possible in our industry, creating disruptively simple, powerfully clear ways to maximize financial outcomes and drive down healthcare costs.
We're hiring an AI Engineer to build LLM-powered products that actually ship. You'll live at the seam between research and production — turning models, prompts, and retrieval into reliable systems users depend on. Less "train a model from scratch," more "make foundation models do useful work at scale, cheaply, and without hallucinating."
What you'll do
- Design and build LLM applications: RAG pipelines, agents, tool-use systems, structured generation, multi-step workflows
- Own prompt engineering and evaluation — write evals before you write prompts, and treat both as code
- Integrate foundation models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-weight Llama/Qwen/Mistral) and know when to reach for which
- Build the unglamorous infrastructure that makes LLMs production-grade: caching, streaming, retries, fallbacks, cost controls, observability, guardrails
- Fine-tune or distill models when prompting hits a wall (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, DPO)
- Partner with product and design on UX patterns specific to AI (latency masking, streaming UIs, confidence display, human-in-the-loop)
What we're looking for
- 3+ years of software engineering, with at least 1 year shipping LLM-based features in production
- Strong Python and TypeScript; comfortable in a real codebase, not just notebooks
- Deep practical knowledge of the LLM stack: prompting techniques, function calling, structured outputs, context management, embedding models, vector search
- Have built and maintained an eval suite — and have opinions on why most public benchmarks are misleading
- Comfortable with at least one orchestration approach (custom, LangGraph, Inngest, Temporal) and one vector store (pgvector, Pinecone, Turbopuffer, Weaviate)
- Cost- and latency-aware: can read a token bill and a trace and know where to cut
- Clear communicator who can push back when "just add AI" isn't the right answer
Nice to have
- Experience with agent frameworks and MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Fine-tuning experience on open-weight models, or work with inference servers like vLLM/TGI/SGLang
- Background in security, evals, or red-teaming for LLM systems
- Contributions to open-source AI tooling
What we offer
- Work from anywhere in the US! Machinify is digital-first.
Top Medical/Dental/Vision offerings - FSA/HSA
- Tuition reimbursement
- Competitive salary, 401(k) with company match
- Unlimited PTO
- Additional health and wellness benefits and perks
- Flexible and trusting environment where you’ll feel empowered to do your best work
The salary for this position is based on an array of factors unique to each candidate: Such as years and depth of experience, set skills, certifications, etc. We are hiring for different levels and the base salary can range from $210k-$280k+ based on your assessed level. Compensation also includes meaningful equity, healthcare, unlimited PTO, and more.
Equal Employment Opportunity at Machinify We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Machinify is an employment at will employer. We participate in E-Verify as required by applicable law. In accordance with applicable state laws, we do not inquire about salary history during the recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruitment process, please let our recruiters know. See our Candidate Privacy Notice at: https://www.machinify.com/candidate-privacy-notice/