Staff AI Engineer, Connectly.ai
Plus equity
Automated customer communication
Open for applications
Automated customer communication
21-100 employees
Open for applications
Plus equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To create the AI-powered infrastructure of the future to make a message-first mindset as easy as possible; enabling businesses to operate the full flywheel - marketing, sales, transactions, customer experience -all within the customer’s thread of choice.
Role
Who you are
- Exceptional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence technical and strategic direction across the company
- Proven success in defining and implementing large-scale technical strategies in complex or distributed environments
- Deep understanding of both the science and engineering of modern AI systems
- Strategic mindset with the ability to balance long-term platform investments and short-term product needs
- Passion for innovation and applying cutting-edge AI technologies to real-world customer challenges
- MS or BS in Computer Science (required)
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on AI/ML systems
- Proven track record of launching customer-facing AI products using LLMs
- Expertise in model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, and AI evaluations
- Experience leading technical strategy or architecture initiatives across large or multi-disciplinary engineering organizations
- Background in a leading AI or technology company with exposure to world-class engineering practices
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, inference optimization, caching, and large-scale data pipelines
- Hands-on experience with Python, AWS, Kafka, Postgres, and DynamoDB or equivalent technologies
What the job involves
- We are seeking an accomplished and visionary Staff AI Engineer to lead Connectly’s company-wide technical strategy for AI systems and infrastructure
- This position reports directly to the CTO and plays a central role in shaping how Connectly’s technology, architecture, and AI capabilities evolve to serve millions of retail customers across Latin America
- You will drive the design, development, and deployment of large-scale AI systems, leading the company’s efforts to innovate at the intersection of machine learning, conversational interfaces, and enterprise integration
- This role blends deep hands-on technical work with strategic leadership, requiring an engineer who can operate across multiple levels of abstraction, from model tuning and latency optimization to long-term architecture and platform vision
- Define and execute the technical strategy for Connectly’s AI platform in collaboration with the CTO and senior leadership
- Architect, build, and launch production-grade AI systems that power customer-facing conversational experiences at scale
- Lead technical alignment across AI, infrastructure, and application engineering teams spanning Brazil, Bogotá, and San Francisco
- Experiment with and deploy advanced LLMs to address business use cases including retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent orchestration, and contextual reasoning
- Design evaluation frameworks for AI model quality, latency, safety, and overall customer experience
- Develop pipelines for model fine-tuning, prompt optimization, and continuous learning, ensuring high performance and reliability
- Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to optimize cost, performance, and scalability across the AI stack
- Collaborate with product and data leadership to turn strategic objectives into measurable outcomes
- Serve as a hands-on technical mentor, guiding engineering teams and fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, and excellence
Our take
Most SMBs cannot afford to run a full customer service team and, for this reason, messaging is becoming a vital way for these businesses to communicate with their customers. However, turning these messages into revenue isn't easy, which is where Connectly comes in - solving this problem using AI.
By targeting SMBs, the company has tapped into a large market that has been underserved by marketing AI in recent years. Connectly has partnered with WhatsApp, and accrued impressive funding, both clear indicators of the company's promise.
Connectly's main challenge will be competing with others who are also making moves into the SMB market. However, the backing of WhatsApp and continued investor interest will enable it to scale the business and further enhance its proprietary AI models towards a successful future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Sep 2024
$20m
SERIES B
Sep 2023
$7.8m
SERIES A
Total funding: $34.7m
Company benefits
- Significant equity
- Remote & hybrid options
- Health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
- Unlimited time off
- Flexible work hours
- Top of the line workstation
- Twice a year to travel to the US
- A supportive, caring and learning environment
Company HQ
Rincon Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Stefanos Loukakos
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously worked as a Country Director at Google, and as Director of Blockchain at Facebook. Was SVP of Business at HeadSpin.
Yandong Liu
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously worked in Engineering at Uber, and was VP of Engineering at NetEase. Served as CTO of Strava.
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