Staff AI engineer

Job description

At Connectly we are building the future of conversational commerce in Latin America with the focus on Whatsapp. Buying on Whatsapp is ubiquitous in Latin America, yet only small businesses have made it truly seamless by asking real people to respond to Whatsapp messages. We at Connectly are building an AI-powered sales platform for large retailers. We’re a VC-backed Series B startup with a world-class team from Meta, Google, Uber, and other leading Silicon Valley companies. We operate as a hybrid organization, with offices in Bogotá and San Francisco, and distributed teams across Latin America, including Brazil, where many of our AI initiatives are based. **Job summary** - We are seeking an accomplished and visionary **Staff AI Engineer** to lead Connectly’s company-wide technical strategy for AI systems and infrastructure. This position reports directly to the **CTO** and plays a central role in shaping how Connectly’s technology, architecture, and AI capabilities evolve to serve millions of retail customers across Latin America. You will drive the design, development, and deployment of large-scale AI systems, leading the company’s efforts to innovate at the intersection of machine learning, conversational interfaces, and enterprise integration. This role blends deep hands-on technical work with strategic leadership, requiring an engineer who can operate across multiple levels of abstraction, from model tuning and latency optimization to long-term architecture and platform vision. **Responsibilities include:** - Define and execute the technical strategy for Connectly’s AI platform in collaboration with the CTO and senior leadership. - Architect, build, and launch production-grade AI systems that power customer-facing conversational experiences at scale. - Lead technical alignment across AI, infrastructure, and application engineering teams spanning Brazil, Bogotá, and San Francisco. - Experiment with and deploy advanced LLMs to address business use cases including retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent orchestration, and contextual reasoning. - Design evaluation frameworks for AI model quality, latency, safety, and overall customer experience. - Develop pipelines for model fine-tuning, prompt optimization, and continuous learning, ensuring high performance and reliability. - Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to optimize cost, performance, and scalability across the AI stack. - Collaborate with product and data leadership to turn strategic objectives into measurable outcomes. - Serve as a hands-on technical mentor, guiding engineering teams and fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, and excellence. **What will make you excel at this job:** - Exceptional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence technical and strategic direction across the company. - Proven success in defining and implementing large-scale technical strategies in complex or distributed environments. - Deep understanding of both the science and engineering of modern AI systems. - Strategic mindset with the ability to balance long-term platform investments and short-term product needs. - Passion for innovation and applying cutting-edge AI technologies to real-world customer challenges. **Requirements:** - MS or BS in Computer Science (required). - 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on AI/ML systems. - Proven track record of launching customer-facing AI products using LLMs. - Expertise in model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, and AI evaluations. - Experience leading technical strategy or architecture initiatives across large or multi-disciplinary engineering organizations. - Background in a leading AI or technology company with exposure to world-class engineering practices. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, inference optimization, caching, and large-scale data pipelines. - Hands-on experience with Python, AWS, Kafka, Postgres, and DynamoDB or equivalent technologies. **Benefits** - Direct impact on the company’s technical and AI strategy alongside the CTO. - Competitive compensation and equity participation. - Unlimited time off and flexible working hours. - Hybrid work culture with teams in Brazil, Bogotá, and San Francisco. We are a strong believer in passion, curiosity and willingness to learn on the job. If you are in doubt, we encourage you to apply! Connectly is an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and supportive workplace that is distributed around the world.