About the Position

Senior AI Engineer

Colombia - Remote

Company Overview

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.

Responsibilities

Craft & Delivery

Design, implement, and deploy ML/AI models end-to-end, from concept through production, including data pipelines, training workflows, and optimization for performance, accuracy, and efficiency.
Maintain and evolve AI systems in production, monitoring for drift, debugging issues, and driving ongoing improvements to reliability and scalability.
Bring an AI-forward coding mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude and Cursor to ship higher-quality work at pace.

Collaboration & Communication

Partner closely with product, engineering, and data teams to align AI work with broader product and business goals.
Translate technical tradeoffs, model behavior, and constraints into terms non-specialists can act on.
Participate actively in code reviews and design discussions, raising concerns and offering constructive feedback.

Leadership & Influence

Contribute to AI architecture decisions with thoughtful perspective on tradeoffs and long-term implications.
Take ownership of meaningful work end-to-end, including the unglamorous parts of getting AI into production.
Raise the bar on engineering practices through your own work and by supporting more junior engineers when opportunities arise.

Requirements

4+ years professional software engineering experience, with 2+ years focused on AI/ML systems in production and hands-on experience with generative AI development.
Strong software engineering background (Python or similar).
Working knowledge of cloud platforms, preferably with in-depth understanding of AWS services and AWS GenAI offerings.
Proven ability to design and ship agentic systems.
Experience with AI frameworks and orchestration tools.
Experience with evaluation frameworks, and observability tools for LLM apps.
Understanding of AI safety, responsible AI principles, prompt injection defenses, and PII handling.
Hands-on experience building RAG pipelines: chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases.
API development experience, including designing and integrating with internal and third-party services.
Cost optimization expertise: token economics, caching strategies, model routing, quantization.
Working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments.
Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate ambiguous technical challenges with sound judgment.

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.

Why Join Robots & Pencils?

At Robots & Pencils, we build intelligent systems for real-world environments, blending creativity, engineering excellence, and applied AI to help organizations work smarter. Our teams partner directly with leading North American organizations to design and deliver production-ready digital and AI solutions that create measurable impact.

As an AI Engineer, you will build production AI systems alongside experienced architects and senior engineers, strengthening your foundation in machine learning, scalable system design, and modern cloud-native delivery. You’ll collaborate closely with US-based clients, gaining hands-on exposure to complex problem-solving while contributing to meaningful, real-world outcomes.

By joining Robots & Pencils, you also benefit from our Advanced AWS Partnership and participation in the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of more than 190,000 AWS partners. This provides access to specialized training, early access to emerging cloud capabilities, and advanced engineering resources that support accelerated professional growth.

This is a role for builders who want to sharpen their craft, grow quickly, and deliver impactful AI systems within an elite global engineering ecosystem.

Senior AI Engineer

Job description