Senior AI Engineer
Unblocked · Vancouver
Extracted from the posting
Senior AI Engineer role at Unblocked, a small, well-funded SaaS company building a context engine for software developers. Work covers data pipelines and AI services, end-to-end LLM systems, and agent architectures across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and open-source models. Requires production LLM experience, context engineering (retrieval, embeddings, reranking), and building evaluation harnesses.
About Unblocked
Unblocked is a high-growth, well-funded SaaS company that answers questions software teams have about their code, so engineers can spend less time in meetings and more time shipping.
We're a small team with a track record of building developer tools that solve real problems. You'll help define Unblocked, shape its roadmap, build the experiences customers love, and get firsthand feedback from the teams who use what we ship.
About You
You've built and shipped products that engineers love, including the pipelines and services behind them. You live in modern AI developer tools: Claude Code, Cursor, agentic CLIs, MCP servers, and you have strong opinions on where they shine and where they fall short. You want to raise the bar for AI developer experience across the industry.
What You’ll Do
As a Senior AI Engineer at Unblocked, you'll help design, build, and scale the market's best context engine. Working alongside experienced engineers, you'll:
- Build and scale data pipelines and AI services that ingest and process large volumes of structured and unstructured data
- Design end-to-end LLM systems across prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, and evaluation frameworks
- Work across frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and open source, routing intelligently by capability, latency, and cost
- Design clean tool and context surfaces that agents can reliably reason and act over
- Obsess over developer experience. Our customers are engineers and expect that we push the bar higher with every release
- Influence the roadmap, mentor teammates, and continuously raise the technical bar for the whole team
Requirements
- Based in Vancouver, BC, and willing to be in the office four days a week
- You've shipped production LLM applications at scale, not just notebook prototypes
- Hands-on experience with context engineering: agentic retrieval, chunking, embeddings, reranking, graphs
- Hands-on experience with frontier models across providers, with a view on when to reach for each
- A track record of building evaluation harnesses for non-deterministic systems and using them to ship with confidence
- Expert familiarity with agentic coding environments
- Demonstrated leadership of teammates through the delivery of a project
- Experience architecting and shipping complex backend systems, ideally in AI/ML or data-heavy domains
Desirable Skills
- Working knowledge of AI observability and eval tooling
- Expert-level software development skills in a modern typesafe language
- You've built MCP servers, agent SDKs, or other developer-facing AI infrastructure
- Experience with safety and guardrails for LLM systems, including prompt injection, PII handling, and untrusted content ingestion
- Eval-driven optimization through distillation or fine-tuning, where it actually pays off
Culturally, we’re looking for people who are:
- Driven with a bias for action: You prototype in hours, not weeks. You ship, watch users, and iterate. You're a maker, not a deliberator
- AI-native: Modern AI developer tools are muscle memory for you, not novelty. You have opinions on agent loops, context windows, model routing, and tool design, and you want to raise the bar for AI developer experience across the industry
- Able to play well with others: Comfortable in collaborative work environments. A solid communicator and an even better listener, humble enough to actively solicit and incorporate feedback
- A passionate, tireless, selfless advocate for the end-user: Unwavering in your desire to provide the best experience. An effective champion for the interests of the developer
- Different: You bring a unique perspective, skill set, or way of working that up-levels an already strong team. Willing to work outside your comfort zone and learn from others
- An ambitious malcontent: Dissatisfied with the status quo in the world around you. Constantly aware of the potential for improvement, with a keen desire to help technology play a more meaningful role in people's lives
What’s in it for you?
- A competitive base salary.
- Equity in the company for eligible candidates, offering the opportunity to share in our long-term success and growth.
- Generous medical and dental benefits.
- A very flexible vacation policy.
- Your choice of Apple hardware to get you started.
- Personal growth. We’re a small company where there’s no shortage of different projects to work on.
