[Remote] Staff Engineer AI/ML
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AnswersNow is a company focused on revolutionizing autism therapy through an innovative virtual ABA therapy platform. They are seeking a Staff Engineer specializing in AI/ML to lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and ensure the health of the engineering organization while integrating machine learning models into their core platform.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the architecture of our core platform: React frontend, Node.js/Express APIs, Postgres, and AWS ECS infrastructure
- Drive our JavaScript → TypeScript migration, establishing patterns, tooling, and standards the team can follow
- Design and extend our ETL pipeline and config-driven AI integration framework, enabling engineers to ship AI-powered features faster and more reliably
- Lead technical design reviews, create architecture decision records (ADRs), and ensure engineering decisions are documented and defensible
- Identify and resolve systemic technical debt — not just flagging it, but owning the plan to address it
- Define and execute the technical strategy for integrating ML/AI models into our core platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability
- Mentor engineers across all levels — pair, review, coach, and grow the team's collective capability
- Establish and maintain engineering standards: code quality, testing practices, observability, on-call runbooks, and incident response
- Serve as a technical resource and thought partner for product, clinical, and business stakeholders
- Help define the engineering hiring bar and participate in the interview process
- Partner with engineering leadership and product to scope, sequence, and de-risk large technical initiatives
- Lead by example on production support — define runbooks, own post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes from incidents
- Work across UI, API, DB, and infrastructure layers with genuine depth in at least two
Skills
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a senior or staff-level role
- Deep expertise in JavaScript and TypeScript in a production full-stack environment
- Strong command of React, Node.js/Express, and Postgres — you can reason about performance, reliability, and maintainability at each layer
- Proven experience designing and owning distributed systems or data pipeline architectures on AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda experience valued)
- Track record of technical mentorship — you've made engineers around you measurably better
- Excellent written and verbal communication; you can write an architecture doc, run a design review, and brief a non-technical executive in the same day
- Experience working in or leading engineering at a growth-stage startup — you understand the balance between velocity and sustainability
- Significant experience architecting and deploying production-grade ML/AI systems, including LLM integration and model lifecycle management
- Familiarity with ETL pipelines, AI/LLM integration patterns, or data-intensive systems is a strong plus
- Experience with healthcare or regulated data environments (HIPAA compliance, PHI handling)
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues, or streaming pipelines
- Prior experience as an engineering manager who returned to an IC track (player-coach background welcome)
- Contributions to open source or engineering blog posts / conference talks
Benefits
- Fully remote – work from anywhere in the U.S.
- Flexible hours with an async-friendly team culture
Company Overview