Staff Engineer, AI Operations

About the Role

For this job, we are currently only hiring candidates based in the United States.

Ontra is seeking a Staff Engineer, AI Operations, reporting to our Director of AI Operations. As the first engineer dedicated to the function, this person will have broad company impact while remaining hands-on.

We're looking for someone excited to serve as the technical lead for company-wide Internal AI work, partner with business and technical owners to choose the right response to priority problems, build and operate dependable AI Operations-owned solutions, and collaborate with AI engineers across GTM, Finance, Build, and other teams on architecture and review.

If you're someone who brings sound technical and business judgment, designs practical architecture without overbuilding, treats production ownership as part of the job, leads cross-functionally without relying on reporting authority, exercises strong security and data judgment, and communicates tradeoffs clearly, we'd love to get to know you.

What You'll Do

• Set Technical Direction for Internal AI: Evaluate technical options for prioritized Internal AI work and recommend the architecture, integrations, and delivery approach. Recommend, with the accountable business and technical owners, whether to use an existing Ontra capability, configure or buy a vendor product, build something new, or not proceed.

• Design and Deliver Dependable, Reusable Systems: Architect, build, and operate selected services, agents, integrations, and automations for agreed Internal AI priorities. Use existing platforms and vendor capabilities where they fit and turn recurring needs into reusable patterns other teams can adopt.

• Partner Across the Business: Work closely with business and technical owners across GTM, Finance, Build, and other teams to assess problems, align on approach, and move decisions forward.

• Lead Through Technical Partnership: Shape cross-system architecture decisions and guide design and code review for Internal AI work. Partner with relevant technical owners, including Infrastructure, Data, Security, and IT when work touches their platforms or authority, and help other engineers and advanced builders improve without relying on management authority.

• Support Trusted Company Context: Assess and implement selected interfaces and integrations that help approved AI systems use reliable company data and knowledge while preserving source permissions and ownership.

• Own Production Reliability: Ensure every service you ship has qualified review, a named owner and backup, documentation, monitoring, recovery steps, and a maintenance plan.

• Deliver Against Milestones: Own the technical assessment, design, implementation, and operation of agreed Internal AI priorities, meeting quality, reliability, recovery, usage, and cost targets along the way, with the telemetry and cost attribution needed to evaluate performance.

What You'll Bring

• Experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated Staff-level scope and impact across teams or systems; hands-on experience delivering production AI systems is required.

• Staff-Level Technical Leadership: A track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams, systems, or business areas, with clear evidence of scope over tenure or title.

• Production AI Ownership: Experience shipping and operating at least one production AI-enabled system, including evaluation, reliability, data, cost, and post-launch ownership.

• Systems and Integration Design: Experience designing internal services, agents, APIs, integrations, automations, or data flows across system boundaries, with working production knowledge of identity, authorization, testing, deployment, monitoring, incidents, and recovery.

• Design and Code Review: Ability to assess unfamiliar systems and provide strong design and code review across technical boundaries.

• Hands-On Engineering: Strong hands-on production software engineering skills; recent Python experience is preferred. SQL and data validation experience is a plus.

APAC

Hong Kong

EMEA

United Kingdom

Benefits Snapshot

• Remote-first working policy, with office hubs in NYC, Santa Barbara, and London

• Twice yearly team offsites for in-person collaboration

• Paid flexible time off policy

• Paid parental leave and benefits

• Employer-supported retirement contributions, varying by country

• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement

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