Senior Staff AI Engineer

XPENG

$244K — $413K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience.
  • 10+ years of software engineering experience with complex systems.
  • Deep expertise in AI/ML and deploying language models in production.
  • Hands-on experience with scaling agentic AI systems.
  • Strong background in evaluation systems and LLM-as-Judge frameworks.
  • Expertise in observability and performance measurement of AI systems.
  • Proven ability to drive engineering standards in AI systems.

Responsibilities

  • Lead design and development of AI applications with LLMs and retrieval systems.
  • Define architecture and standards for Applied AI to enhance reliability and reuse.
  • Translate business opportunities into measurable AI product roadmaps.
  • Collaborate across engineering teams to optimize AI investments and avoid duplication.
  • Drive improvements in AI methodologies and integrate emerging capabilities.
  • Establish governance and safety practices within AI lifecycle management.
  • Promote AI literacy and adoption through demos and technical guidance.
  • Implement evaluation and monitoring practices for system quality and safety.

Benefits

  • Supportive and engaging work environment.
  • Chance to impact the future of transportation with autonomous technology.
  • Work with cutting-edge technologies and top industry talent.
  • Competitive compensation package.
  • Access to snacks, lunches, and fun activities.
Full Job Description
We are looking for a hands-on Senior Staff AI Engineer to build and scale production-grade AI systems that drive measurable impact across internal teams. This role owns the end-to-end delivery of applied AI solutions-partnering with product, engineering, and cross-functional teams across the organization to identify high-value use cases, and translating them into scalable systems using LLMs, retrieval, and agentic workflows. You will also define architecture and reusable patterns to enable AI adoption broadly, while setting a high bar for reliability, evaluation, and performance.

Job Responsibilities:
  • Lead the technical design and hands-on development of prioritized AI applications, services, and platforms leveraging state-of-the-art LLM app stacks, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, and scalable serving.
  • Define long-term architecture and engineering standards for Applied AI systems to maximize reuse, reliability, and impact across multiple product areas.
  • Partner with business sponsors to translate high-value opportunities into roadmaps and shipped products with clear success metrics and measurable outcomes.
  • Build a holistic view of AI investments by collaborating with adjacent engineering groups implementing AI in their domains, aligning patterns, reusing components, and avoiding duplication.
  • Drive continuous improvement in AI methodologies and best practices; evaluate emerging capabilities and land them as secure, production-grade systems.
  • Collaborate with stakeholders to embed robust governance, privacy, security, safety, and reporting practices across the AI lifecycle.
  • Champion AI literacy, enablement, and adoption through demos, guidance, and technical leadership across the organization.
  • Establish rigorous evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring practices; instrument offline and online metrics to ensure quality, safety, and SLOs.


Minimum Skill Requirements:
  • BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record delivering complex, production-grade systems.
  • Deep technical expertise in AI/ML, with hands-on experience building and deploying systems using language models, retrieval/grounding (RAG), embeddings/vector search, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Hands-on experience building and scaling agentic AI systems in production environments.
  • Strong experience designing and implementing evaluation systems, including LLM-as-Judge frameworks, metric design, synthetic data generation, and agent benchmarking pipelines.
  • Proven ability to establish feedback loops from production systems into evaluation and model improvement workflows.
  • Expertise in AI/LLM observability and tracing, including instrumentation of systems and analysis of trace data for performance, latency, and correctness (e.g., OpenTelemetry-based tools such as LangFuse or equivalent).
  • Experience architecting and deploying enterprise-scale AI systems or subsystems, with the ability to define technical direction, architecture, and reusable platform components across teams.
  • Deep expertise in at least one of the following areas:
    • Agent memory systems (context management, long-term persistence, retrievaloptimization).
    • AI gateways / tool orchestration layers (e.g., MCP, service integration, authorization, tool discovery).
    • Agentic workflows and orchestration (multi-step planning, tool calling, error recovery, concurrency).
  • Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous problems into scalable AI systems with measurable impact.
  • Experience driving engineering standards, improving system reliability, observability, and performance (latency, throughput, cost).
  • Strong familiarity with security, privacy, compliance, safety, and auditability in enterprise AI systems.
  • Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence and align across engineering, product, and other internal teams.
  • Proven ability to learn and apply new technologies quickly through hands-on development.


Preferred Skill Requirements:
  • Experience building custom evaluation harnesses or contributing to open-source harness frameworks.
  • Contributions to widely used third-party benchmarks or evaluation suites.
  • Hands-on experience developing and evaluating coding agents or code-generation systems.
  • Experience working with and deploying open-source language models.


What do we provide:
  • A fun, supportive and engaging environment.
  • Opportunity to make significant impact on transportation revolution by the means of advancing autonomous driving.
  • Opportunity to work on cutting edge technologies with the top talent in the field.
  • Competitive compensation package.
  • Snacks, lunches and fun activities.


The base salary range for this full-time position is $244,140 - $413,160, in addition to bonus, equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

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