Unusual is a growth consultancy that helps companies win over a new audience: AI agents. Backed by Y Combinator.
About the role
We’re looking for a Senior Principal AI Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across complex, production-grade AI systems. This role is for a builder-architect—someone who has repeatedly taken AI systems from idea to production, understands where they fail at scale, and knows how to unblock teams to move faster without sacrificing outcomes.
What they're looking for
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript, React, Go, Python and modern AI frameworks
- Extensive experience with LLMs, including RAG, tool use, prompt systems, and agentic architectures
- Proven ability to design and ship large-scale AI systems that run reliably in real-world environments
- Strong architectural judgment across data systems, AI models, infrastructure, and application layers
- Deep understanding of AI failure modes: hallucination, drift, brittleness, latency, and cost blowups
More about this role
Overview
We’re looking for a Senior Principal AI Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across complex, production-grade AI systems. This role is for a builder-architect—someone who has repeatedly taken AI systems from idea to production, understands where they fail at scale, and knows how to unblock teams to move faster without sacrificing outcomes.
This is not a pure strategy or people-management role. It is a deeply technical builder role with organizational impact. You will define technical direction by writing code, designing systems, and helping the organization stay in builder mode as complexity and scale increase.
- Architect and build end-to-end AI systems including LLM orchestration, retrieval layers, agentic workflows, and structured reasoning systems
- Lead the design of multi-agent and tool-calling systems that operate reliably in production
- Establish and evolve architecture patterns for scalable, cost-aware, and observable AI applications
- Drive technical decisions across data modeling, AI pipelines, infrastructure, and APIs
- Define best practices for evaluation, monitoring, and governance of AI systems in production
- Mentor senior engineers through...
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