Senior AI Engineer

Hillspire, LLC is the family office management company serving all the investments, foundations, and activities of Eric and Wendy Schmidt and family. With a uniquely broad mandate, Hillspire oversees diverse assets and programs, including The Schmidt Family Foundation, Schmidt Ocean Institute, and Schmidt Sciences. Across our entities, we manage over 900 employees and oversee significant annual expenditures, ranging from grants and gifts to private investments and operational costs.

We are seeking a highly motivated, innovative, and collaborative Technology staff member to serve as the Senior AI Engineer. The selected candidate will be a member of the Enterprise Technology Data Engineering & AI team, playing a pivotal role in driving innovation across the organization.

Summary

The ideal candidate will architect and develop production-grade LLM agents and RAG pipelines, steer the full ML lifecycle from data prep to GPU-scaled deployment, and weave together modern tools and technologies into a secure, cost-aware platform. If you thrive on turning ambiguous ideas into high-impact GenAI products, and mentoring others to do the same, this is your playground.

Responsibilities

• Build & Ship Gen AI Apps Design, prototype, and build GenAI solutions, RAG document pipelines, and task-specific agents to support multiple business functions using tools such as LangChain/LlamaIndex, micro-services, Ray/KubeRay.
• Agent Workflow Pipelines Design and orchestrate multi-step agent pipelines, integrating LLM prompts, external APIs, and human-in-the-loop escalations.
• End-to-End ML Lifecycle Own requirements → data prep → feature engineering → classical ML or LLM fine-tuning (LoRA, PEFT, RLHF) → offline/online evaluation → MLflow registry, with automated drift and quality alerts.
• Data & Storage Architecture Ingest from BigQuery, object-store lakes (Parquet, Avro); generate embeddings and persist to vector DBs (Qdrant/PgVector); enforce governance via OpenMetadata and column-level ACLs.
• Scalable Deployment & Ops Package with Docker, helm-deploy on Kubernetes; implement GPU scheduling, autoscaling, blue-green rollouts, and cost telemetry via Prometheus/Grafana; automate CI/CD in GitHub Actions.
• Observability & Compliance Instrument tracking, metrics, and structured logs; run A/B or shadow tests; embed security, privacy, and cost-guardrails in every pipeline.
• Lead & Mentor Translate ambiguous business ideas into executable roadmaps, run build-vs-buy analysis, set code standards, and coach peers on agentic patterns and ethical AI.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Data Science, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years designing and shipping ML/AI applications, including 2+ years with LLMs or Generative AI.
• Demonstrated delivery of RAG or agentic systems in production (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, n8n, or custom).
• Expert-level Python and SQL; strong Spark, distributed data-processing, and performance-tuning skills.
• Hands-on fine-tuning of foundation models; comfort with MLflow, Ray/KubeRay, and vector databases.
• Deep familiarity with cloud warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift), lake formats (Parquet, Avro), and streaming/ingestion tools (e.g. Airbyte, Kafka/Pub-Sub).
• Production experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and Git-based CI/CD pipelines.
• Clear communicator able to gather requirements, set technical direction, and influence cross-functional teams.