Senior AI Engineer
$134k - $206k USD
Your work will change lives. Including your own.
The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior AI Engineer to design, build, and evolve our internal AI Agent ecosystem within the IT Engineering team. This role focuses on applying a high-level software engineering mindset to design complex, scalable agentic frameworks and platforms that systematically eliminate toil. You will be responsible for defining the technical standards and building the resilient infrastructure that powers these agents, ensuring our AI Agents drive operational velocity and effectively support our growth in the TechBio space.
The Impact You'll Make
- Architect and implement complex, multi-agent orchestration frameworks and sophisticated AI Agents that autonomously handle business and scientific workflows, setting the standard for how agents interact with sensitive data and legacy systems.
- Design and build the core internal developer platforms and shared libraries that standardize agent deployment, allowing the wider organization to self-serve automations with built-in security and governance.
- Drive the strategy for autonomous operations and infrastructure-as-code, engineering self-healing systems that manage configuration, identity, and system health with minimal human intervention.
- Establish the observability standards (LLMOps) required to debug non-deterministic AI behaviors, conducting systemic root cause analyses to engineer out entire classes of failure modes and prevent recurrence.
- Partner with cross-functional leadership to translate high-level business goals into technical architectures, identifying high-leverage opportunities where AI can fundamentally restructure workflows rather than just patching them.
- Serve as a technical leader for our AI Agent stack, elevating the team’s engineering bar through architectural decision records, code reviews, and mentorship that fosters a culture of technical excellence.
The Experience You'll Need
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a specific focus on distributed systems, platform engineering, and a proven track record of architecting production-grade AI solutions in recent years.
- Mastery of Python and deep familiarity with modern software design principles, creating code that is not just functional but a standard for others to follow.
- Comprehensive command of the GenAI stack, including advanced RAG strategies, vector store architecture, and memory management for stateful agents.
- Demonstrated experience building shared libraries; you won’t just build agents, you’ll build the tools that allow the organization to build agents at scale.
- Expert-level understanding of API design and middleware strategies to securely integrate non-deterministic AI agents into complex, deterministic enterprise ecosystems.
- Deep experience with LLMOps, specifically regarding observability, evaluation frameworks, and debugging complex, asynchronous agent workflows.
- A rigorous engineering approach to "unknown unknowns," with the ability to diagnose systemic bottlenecks and architect permanent solutions for reliability and latency.
- Superior communication skills with the ability to translate technical architectural trade-offs into business value, influencing stakeholders across non-technical departments.
- Demonstrated success in going beyond convention to drive transformational impact, rethinking what is possible rather than just optimizing what exists.
- A track record of breaking down silos and sharing knowledge freely, partnering deeply across functions to reveal new possibilities and ensure the team is greater than the sum of its parts.
- Proven ability to embrace iteration over perfection, actively experimenting, testing, and refining solutions because progress comes from doing.
- Experience taking ownership and accountability for decisive action, following through on commitments and owning outcomes rather than just tasks.
- Experience acting boldly with integrity, taking calculated risks and pushing boundaries without ever compromising on ethics, science, or trust.
- A history of operating with urgency because patients are waiting, prioritizing what matters most to move the needle every day.
Nice to Haves
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience; advanced degrees or research experience in ML/AI.
- Experience with Knowledge Graphs and GraphRAG to structure connected data and reveal patterns that simple vector retrieval misses.
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning open-weights models or utilizing Small Language Models (SLMs) for cost-efficient, low-latency, and secure internal tasks.
- Familiarity with implementing guardrails and managing PII/PHI compliance to ensure we push boundaries without compromising ethics or trust.
- Experience with Terraform or Pulumi to manage cloud resources at scale, treating infrastructure as a flexible, version-controlled software discipline.
- Proficiency in designing event-driven architectures that allow agents to react instantaneously to complex business triggers.
Working Location & Compensation:
This is an office-based, hybrid role in either our Salt Lake City or New York City office. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time.
At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is $134,200 to $205,800. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.
#LI-EP1
The Values We Hope You Share:
- We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
- We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
- We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
- We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
- We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
- We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.
Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.
More About Recursion
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting.
Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation. Learn more at www.recursion.com, or connect on X and LinkedIn.
Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.
Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.