Staff AI Engineer

Acquia empowers global brands to create digital customer experiences using open-source Drupal and the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP). This role involves building retrieval, graph, and inference layers on top of Acquia’s data platform, enabling agentic AI systems that automate complex digital workflows.

Key Responsibilities:

• Write and ship production AI code daily as an active contributor.
• Lead work on making customer context retrievable at speed across semantic retrieval, indexing, and knowledge graph approaches.
• Build inference and signal layers using models and processors that read from an Iceberg-based lakehouse and expose signals for other teams.
• Turn detected conditions (e.g., churn risk, entitlement mismatch) into automated workflows with human review where necessary.
• Choose the right tool for each workload: large models, fine-tuned models, or deterministic code, while managing inference costs.
• Own evaluation and observability for AI systems to ensure signals are sound before action.
• Set patterns for other teams to build against and align company goals with shipped systems.

How We Think About Experience:

We prioritize adaptability and learning over prior expertise. Our stack includes Python, SQL, dbt, distributed query engines, and evolving AI frameworks. You’ll need to quickly learn unfamiliar tools and leverage AI to accelerate contributions.

Required Experience:

• 8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years shipping AI or ML systems to production.
• Strong programming fundamentals and deep proficiency in Python (primary language for ML and insights).
• Fluency working with data at scale, including advanced SQL, dbt, and distributed query engines over lakehouse or warehouse storage.
• Production retrieval and context engineering, including embeddings, vector search, hybrid/graph retrieval, and entity/relationship modeling.
• Agentic systems and durable workflows in production, with tool calling, state, memory, and human-in-the-loop patterns (e.g., Temporal, LangGraph).
• Evaluation and observability for AI systems, including tracing, prompt/version management, and dataset-driven testing.
• Cloud deployment experience (AWS preferred) with containerized services and ownership of inference costs.
• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Desired Skills:

• Experience standing up shared data/ML capabilities for other teams.
• Small and fine-tuned model work, including model distillation for scale.
• Observability data fluency (e.g., OpenTelemetry, logs, metrics, traces).
• Data governance instincts (access control, lineage, residency).
• Familiarity with enterprise SaaS/CMS, including Acquia’s Drupal-based DXP.
• Agentic development workflow fluency (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Copilot, MCP).
• Strong communication skills to present AI designs to engineers and C-suite.
• Senior IC track record with mentorship through high-quality work.