Staff AI Engineer

Spara (Headquarters: New York, NY (Hybrid))

AI Machine Learning Python Transformers Model Fine-Tuning Evaluation NLP Large Language Models Google Anthropic Meta OpenAI AI Engineer Staff Engineer

**About Spara:** Spara builds enterprise-grade AI agents that engage, qualify, and convert sales leads into revenue. We're solving a complex, high-impact sales problem ($28B market) through sophisticated multi-modal interactions, leveraging leading-edge foundation models across multiple providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google...).

**About The Role:** We are seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join our Infrastructure Foundations team, where you will play a key role in driving the technical strategy, execution, and leadership of projects across AI architecture, model optimization, and evaluation frameworks. This is an exciting opportunity to significantly impact the scalability, reliability, and operational excellence of Spara's AI infrastructure, while also mentoring and guiding the team.

**What You'll Do / Responsibilities:**
- Lead the design and development of systems that optimize AI model performance and scale for global expansion.
- Drive architectural decisions for high-impact projects, ensuring scalability and reliability of our AI engine.
- Co-author long-term technical roadmaps that set the vision for AI scalability, performance, and engineering velocity.
- Set the standard for a culture of engineering and operational excellence in AI development.
- Build and nurture effective partnerships across engineering, product, and security teams to align on AI infrastructure goals.
- Lead and conduct design reviews for critical AI projects with a focus on system-level tradeoffs and model scalability.
- Drive the design and implementation of “secure by default” AI systems in collaboration with security teams.
- Act as a key stakeholder by engaging with customers and internal teams to understand business requirements and deliver innovative AI solutions.

**What You'll Bring / Requirements / Qualifications:**
- Proven experience leading complex engineering efforts focused on AI model development, optimization, and evaluation.
- Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders and lead cross-functional teams.
- A track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and making thoughtful system-level tradeoffs.
- At least 8+ years of coding experience in languages like Python, with strong expertise in writing concurrent and distributed code.
- Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, leveraging concurrency primitives, and optimizing AI performance.
- Deep expertise in AI and machine learning systems, with familiarity across adjacent infrastructure domains.
- Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and the ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability.
- A strong sense of ownership and the ability to balance short-term priorities with long-term strategic goals.