nSCALE Verified

IT Services, Cloud Consulting, Management Consulting

Staff AI Product Engineer

Houston, TXOnsiteFull TimeStaff$220,000–$330,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

GenAI
AI Stack
API Design
Platform Engineering
Large-scale Distributed Systems
Cloud Services
Control Plane
Data Plane
Cell-based Architecture
Horizontal Scalability

Nice to have

AI/ML Product Platforms
Inference APIs
Fine-tuning UX
Model Management
Evaluation Tooling
Extensible Platform Layers

Role summary

Nscale is seeking a Staff AI Product Engineer to lead technical direction for their GenAI cloud platform. This role involves setting architectural standards, resolving complex issues, and creating engineering leverage across 2-4 teams. The engineer will define the AI services platform, including APIs, developer experience, billing, and identity. Responsibilities include driving architectural decisions, identifying systemic improvements for performance and reliability, coaching senior engineers, and partnering with leadership to align technical strategy with business goals. The role requires extensive experience in platform engineering, API design, distributed systems, and cloud services, with a strong focus on reliability, cost management, and technical standards.

About Nscale

Nscale is taking on the hyperscalers by building a vertically integrated GenAI cloud platform. We own the data centers, software, and applications that power today’s AI stack using sustainable technology solutions. We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As a Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. Collaboration is key, and we work together swiftly and respectfully, embracing adaptability and resilience in all we do.

About the Role

Nscale is looking for a Staff AI Product Engineer to drive technical direction across the AI product domain. Working across 2–4 teams, you’ll set architectural standards, resolve complex cross-cutting concerns, and create engineering leverage that accelerates the entire product organization.

As a Staff engineer, you define how Nscale’s AI services platform is built — establishing the patterns, APIs, and systems that other engineers rely on to deliver reliably and at speed. Your scope spans the full platform layer: AI service capabilities, API gateway, developer experience, billing, identity, and the extensibility surfaces that enterprise and developer customers build on. Your decisions will have meaningful, lasting impact on platform scalability, developer experience, and product velocity.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for the AI product platform domain across multiple teams

Drive cross-team architectural decisions: service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and platform standards

Identify and lead systemic improvements — performance, reliability, cost, or developer experience — that create leverage across the organization

Resolve ambiguous, open-ended technical problems where the solution space is genuinely undefined

Coach and grow Senior AI Product Engineers across teams; raise technical capability broadly

Partner with product leadership and engineering managers to align technical strategy with business direction

Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions for key platform capabilities and drive them to clear conclusions

Represent the product engineering domain in cross-functional architecture reviews

Requirements

8–12 years of software engineering experience

Proven ability to set technical direction for a product domain, including cross-team architectural patterns

Deep expertise in API design, platform engineering, and large-scale distributed systems

Experience designing cloud services with clear control plane / data plane separation and cell-based architecture for horizontal scalability and blast-radius isolation

Experience building and operating developer-facing platforms used by large numbers of engineers or customers

Proven ability to define the provisioning contract other teams onboard onto: typed inputs, readiness semantics, published outputs, and declared dependencies between provisioned services

Experience with dependency-ordered composition across services owned by different teams — readiness gating, eventual consistency, and deciding what may be provisioned in parallel

Track record of setting versioning and compatibility policy for customer-facing configuration surfaces, and of sequencing change across the schema, controller, packaging, and deployment layers that must land in order

Sustained hands-on production ownership at scale — has carried on-call for systems they designed and fed that operational experience back into the architecture

Track record of raising stability across a domain: SLO and error-budget policy, incident review that produces systemic fixes, and reliability tracked as a measurable trend rather than per-incident firefighting

Experience making cost a first-class engineering signal: usage attribution, cost-per-unit visibility, and guardrails that keep spend predictable as the platform scales

Strong ability to resolve ambiguous, open-ended technical problems at system scope

Demonstrated ability to influence without formal authority — across teams, disciplines, and seniority levels

Track record of creating durable technical standards and practices adopted across an organization

Preferred

Experience designing SDK and Terraform provider strategies that enable customers to extend and automate the platform

Track record of building extensible platform layers: plugin systems, API versioning strategies, client library design

Experience building AI/ML product platforms: inference APIs, fine-tuning UX, model management, evaluation tooling

Experience building self-service, paved-path onboarding so teams can ship new deployable units without platform-team involvement

Background in GPU cloud or compute platforms serving ML workloads; experience operating platforms with strict SLAs at scale

The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.

Salary Range$220,000—$330,000 USD

For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.

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