The Staff AI Engineer will serve as a technical leader for Bluefish AI's LLM-powered marketing and advertising products, driving architectural decisions, data platform evolution, and cross-functional collaboration. This role spans data backend and ML engineering, focusing on scalable, secure, and cost-efficient systems that deliver measurable outcomes for Fortune 500 clients. The position offers significant ownership and impact in a fast-growing AI startup environment.
What You'll Do
- Lead end-to-end architecture for data platforms and pipelines: scraping, data extraction, transformation, storage, serving, and ML/LLM integration, balancing performance, reliability, security, and cost.
- Incrementally scale pipelines and systems: design safe rollout plans and north star data-quality metrics to handle customer and traffic growth without impacting production.
- Translate business goals into actionable data products: assess high-level requirements, carve clear problem spaces, draft crisp RFCs, and sequence work into deliverable projects for the team.
- Establish and enforce engineering standards: testing strategy, evals, observability, data contracts, and security practices across services.
- Think through short-term and long-term goals to come up with fast go-to-market products, while planning ahead for productization.
- Up-level the org: lead architecture reviews, codify patterns, mentor Senior Engineers, and multiply impact through documentation, code reviews, and pairing.
- Be startup-ready: flexible, comfortable with ambiguity and constant change; proactive about process, documentation, and reliability without over-engineering.
- Lead the collaboration and define how AI engineers work cross-functionally with software engineers, devops, product managers and designers, to conceptualize and shape innovative and impactful solutions.
- Provide mentorship to junior team members and cultivate a culture of collaboration and innovation.
- Ship meaningful experiments: prototype data/ML capabilities, evaluate feasibility and ROI, and make pragmatic calls on productionalizing with an eye on operating costs and risk.
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years building and operating production data systems, including leading cross-cutting architectural changes, and deploying LLMs in real-world scenarios at scale.
- Deep experience Python and modern service architectures; strong system design and data modeling fundamentals.
- Extensive experience with training and deploying machine learning models, particularly within the NLP/LLM domain.
- Proficiency in Python.
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure.
- Fluency in operational maturity: SLOs, on-call/incident practices, and observability.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a bias towards action and outcomes.
- Experience with data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation techniques.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated leadership experience, with the ability to guide and inspire a team.
Technical Stack
Python, LLMs, NLP, machine learning models, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability tools, SLOs, data contracts, model deployment, model evals
Team & Environment
Join a tight-knit group of a globally distributed team with business operations in New York City and engineering in Berlin.
Benefits & Compensation
- Hybrid or remote work flexibility in The United Kingdom
- Unique opportunity to join on the ground floor of a fast-moving startup building at the center of AI
- Tackle challenging and abstract problems while disrupting the $300BN legacy mar-tech industry
- Join an experienced high-performing team where you will have immediate ownership and impact
- Experience a true meritocracy with significant career growth upside as the business scales
Work Mode
Hybrid work model with locations in London, United Kingdom; hybrid or remote work in The United Kingdom is supported.
