Wonder

Staff Engineer - AI

Wonder$225K *
Consumer Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years professional software engineering experience
  • 3+ years building and shipping AI/ML systems in production
  • Expert in distributed systems and high-throughput architecture
  • Hands-on experience with AI agents and LLM workflows
  • Prior role as a founder or early-stage technical leader
  • Proficiency in backend development, Python, TypeScript, and ML tools
  • Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive the technical roadmap for the AI food agent
  • Architect and scale distributed infrastructure for real-time data processing
  • Make technical decisions affecting product-wide architecture
  • Establish evaluation and experimentation infrastructure
  • Implement benchmarks and feedback loops for AI improvement

Benefits

  • Competitive salary package with equity and 401K
  • Multiple medical, dental, and vision plans available
  • Additional unlisted benefits and perks
Full Job Description
About The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer in our AI and Robotics org, you will build a food agent, a personalized meal planning and nutrition product that blends LLM-driven recommendations, health-aligned goal setting, and agentic ordering. You'll shape technical strategy, make key architectural calls, and personally drive high-complexity work from design through production. This role is for someone who has built AI agents and LLM-powered products before, ideally as a founder, founding engineer, or early-stage technical leader, and who is deeply curious about how these systems actually behave at scale. This is not a planning role: you'll write code, review code, and ship code every day.

The Impact You Will Make
  • Define and drive the technical roadmap for our AI food agent, spanning recommendation, personalization, agentic ordering, and health-aligned meal planning
  • Architect and scale distributed infrastructure for real-time retrieval, vector search, multi-modal inference, and LLM orchestration.
  • Serve as technical decision-maker for architectural choices with product-wide scope: data pipelines, model serving, prompt orchestration, RAG, fallback logic, and evaluation frameworks
  • Establish evaluation and experimentation infrastructure: evals, benchmarks, scoring criteria, A/B testing pipelines, and feedback loops that make the AI measurably better over time


What You Bring to the Table

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years building and shipping AI or ML-driven systems in production
  • Deep distributed systems expertise. You've architected infrastructure that handles high-throughput, low-latency workloads at scale
  • Hands-on experience building AI agents, LLM-powered features, or agentic workflows in production. You've worked with retrieval pipelines, prompt orchestration, embedding-based systems, and model evaluation
  • Prior experience as a founder, founding engineer, or early-stage technical leader at a startup. You know what it takes to build from zero with limited resources
  • Proficiency with backend development frameworks and cloud infrastructure. Familiarity with Python, TypeScript, and modern ML tooling
  • Strong system design skills with a track record of shipping scalable, production-grade software under real constraints
  • A degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience)


Our hybrid model requires 3 days a week in the office. That said, many team members choose to come in more often to take advantage of in-person collaboration and connection. You're welcome-and encouraged-to be in the office up to 5 days a week if it works for you.

#LI-Hybrid

New York: $225,000 per year.

Wonder uses geographic-specific salary structures, which means the salary offered may vary depending on where the job is located. The final salary offer will take into account various factors, such as the candidate's skills, education, training, credentials, and experience.

Benefits

The benefits applicable to this role include a competitive compensation package with equity and a 401(k). We also offer a choice of medical, dental, and vision plans, company paid short and long term disability coverage, paid time off including flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable law in addition to paid parental leave, discounted meals and exclusive perks across the Wonder family of brands.

Eligibility, effective dates, and available plan options vary by employment classification and location. To learn more about benefits for this role, visit our Careers page here.

We look forward to hearing from you! We'll contact you via email or text to schedule interviews and share information about your candidacy.

About Wonder

World of Wonder Productions is an American production company founded in 1991 by filmmakers Randy Barbato and Portsmouth-born Fenton Bailey. Based in Los Angeles, California, the company specializes in documentary television and film productions, with credits including the Million Dollar Listing docuseries, RuPaul's Drag Race, and the documentary films Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Together, Bailey and Barbato have produced programming through World of Wonder for HBO, Bravo, HGTV, Showtime, the BBC, Netflix, and VH1. World of Wonder is perhaps best known for its contributions towards LGBTQ programming, for which they won an Outfest Annual Achievement Award in 2011. Their most well known LGBTQ production is RuPaul's Drag Race, having managed the career of drag queen and titular host RuPaul for many years before this, eventually producing the franchise alongside the majority of its live shows, podcasts, television specials, and conventions.
Learn more about Wonder
Industry
Founded
2015

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