Staff AI Engineer
Skills
About the role
This is a hands-on staff AI engineer role at Acquia, remote in Canada, for someone who builds retrieval, inference and agentic systems on top of a large data platform. Acquia runs one of the largest Drupal and digital experience footprints in the world and is building AI-powered content and data products. The role sits within the Data & Intelligence function, spanning observability, the core data platform, and insights and intelligence.
What you’ll do
- Write and ship production AI code daily
- Lead work on semantic retrieval, indexing and knowledge graph approaches over the data platform
- Build the inference and signal layer reading from an Iceberg-based lakehouse
- Turn detected signals such as churn risk or expansion opportunity into workflows that act, with human review where appropriate
- Choose between large models, fine-tuned models or deterministic code, managing inference cost
- Own evaluation and observability for AI systems
- Set patterns other teams build against
What they’re looking for
- 8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years shipping AI or ML systems to production
- Strong programming fundamentals, with Python as the primary language for ML and insights
- Fluency with data at scale: advanced SQL, dbt, and a distributed query engine over lakehouse/warehouse storage
- Production retrieval and context engineering experience: embeddings, vector search, hybrid or graph retrieval
- Experience with agentic systems and durable workflows in production, such as Temporal and LangGraph
- Evaluation and observability experience for AI systems
- Cloud deployment experience (AWS preferred) with containerized services
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
Nice to have
- Experience standing up shared data or ML capability other teams build on
- Small and fine-tuned model work, including distillation
- Observability data fluency with OpenTelemetry at high volume
- Data governance experience around access control, lineage and residency
- Enterprise SaaS or CMS background, ideally with Drupal
- Fluency with AI-assisted coding tools and MCP
What’s on offer
- Competitive healthcare coverage
- Wellness programs
- Flexible time off
- Parental leave
- Recognition programs
Questions about this role
Is this role remote?
Yes, it is a remote role based in Canada.
How many years of experience do I need?
8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years shipping AI or ML systems to production.
What is the tech stack?
Python, SQL, dbt, an Iceberg lakehouse on S3, Temporal, LangGraph and AWS.
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