Data Architect

Staff AI Engineer 

USA (Remote) with 20% Travel. 

At Robots & Pencils, we build meaningful, scalable digital products that solve real business problems. 

We’re looking for a AI Data Architect to support the development and delivery of complex, integration-heavy platforms. This role is ideal for an experienced architect who can confidently own features and deployments, and contributes to team leadership within a pod. 

In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team, building across the stack while helping guide delivery, improve systems, and solve challenging integration problems, including AI-native platforms such as agentic learning systems designed to enable human-centered learning in the Age of AI. 

By joining us, you leverage our Advanced AWS Partnership and the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of 190,000. 

What You’ll Do 

Craft & Delivery 

• Design and implement scalable and reliable approaches to support or automate decision making throughout the business
• Apply a range of data architecture techniques and tools combined with subject matter expertise to solve difficult business problems and cases in which the solution approach is unclear
• Acquire data by building the necessary SQL / ETL queries and import processes through various company specific interfaces for accessing S3, RedShift, and Spark storage systems
• Validate models against alternative approaches, expected and observed outcomes, and other business defined key performance indicators
• Implement models that comply with evaluations of the computational demands, accuracy, and reliability of the relevant ETL processes at various stages of production
• Implement and deploy state of the art machine learning algorithms under Gen AI, build prototypes, troubleshoot customer issues, and explore new solutions 
• Interact closely with customers and with the academic community to drive innovation and deliver tailored data science solutions

Collaboration & Communication 

• Build relationships with stakeholders and counterparts to understand business needs and translate them into data science solutions
• Collaborate closely with engineering, analytics, AI, and product teams to align data science models and insights with broader business goals
• Communicate findings and model results clearly to non-technical executive audiences, ensuring insights are actionable and understood 

Leadership & Influence 

• Establish data architecture best practices and standards that lift the quality and consistency of work across the team 
• Mentor junior and mid-level data engineers, helping them grow their craft, confidence, and impact 
• Bring an AI-forward mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude, Cursor, and other modern AI assistants to deliver higher-quality work at pace

 Required Skills & Experience 

•  10+ years of Data Engineering/ Software Engineering Experience, 5+ years of architecture experience
  • Strong experience with Python and Node.js
• Experience with LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, vector databases (OpenSearch), embeddings, streaming LLM responses, RAG concepts. 
• Experience working with AWS tools such as Bedrock, Lambda, OpenSearch, Step Functions.
• End-to-end architecture; ensures CIL alignment; Owns non-functional requirements such as latency, scale, and compliance
• Experience in production environment building scalable systems
• Familiarity with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL, including scalable design patterns) 
• Demonstrated leadership and technical mentoring experience across a team or organization
• Strong stakeholder communication skills with the ability to translate technical depth across audiences
• Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and expert knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude and Cursor
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate highly ambiguous technical and business challenges with sound judgment

 Nice to Have 

• Demonstrated ability to reason about system-wide impacts of changes, including downstream effects across services and data layers.
• Demonstrated ability to identify design gaps in requirements and raise them before they reach development.
• Experience with Langfuse, synthetic AI testing, token cost optimization, reasoning effort configuration, Step Functions for AI workflows. 

You’ll Do Well Here if You Are 

• A doer. You see something broken and fix it. You'd rather move on clarity than wait for certainty. 
• A fast learner who knows you don't know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You're senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway. 
• Direct in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You'd rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke. 
• Obsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don't put your name on work you wouldn't stand behind. 
• Built for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing. 
• All in. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. 
• Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you. 
• Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work. 
   

 
An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.  We are committed to ensuring equal employment opportunities for all job applicants and employees. Employment decisions are based upon job-related reasons regardless of an applicant's race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, marital status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other status protected by law.