Staff AI Engineer (Contract)

About the role

Momentous is hiring a Staff AI Engineer to anchor a major engagement as the embedded engineering lead inside a client's senior team — peer to their CTO, accountable for architecture and delivery across multiple concurrent projects, leading the engineers working alongside on the engagement. Engagements span custom AI products, knowledge platforms, agentic systems, computer vision, and the infrastructure that runs them. This is a senior individual contributor role with multi-engineer ownership. You will write the hard parts of the code yourself.

Responsibilities

• Operate as the embedded engineering lead on a major engagement, owning architecture across multiple concurrent projects
• Hold a peer-level relationship with the client's senior technical leadership
• Lead the engineering team on the engagement (typically one Senior plus one or two Engineers): code review, design conversations, mentorship
• Set the AI-augmented engineering practice for the engagement
• Write the most complex code on the engagement; own the difficult systems and the difficult outages
• Carry the engineering perspective into business development conversations on adjacent opportunities

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years of production systems work, including 3+ years operating as a tech lead, staff engineer, or embedded engineering lead
• Senior architectural fluency across modern web (TypeScript, React, Next.js), backend (Python or Node), relational databases, and cloud platforms (we use GCP — Cloud Run, Vertex AI)
• Production AI/ML systems experience at depth: RAG architectures, agentic orchestration, evaluation pipelines, model gateways, MCP servers, vector storage
• Direct relationship-level communication with senior client stakeholders: architectural presentations to CEOs and CTOs, exec-level engineering reviews, status notes that get forwarded
• Hands-on willingness — you write the hard parts of the code and remain in the codebase

Preferred qualifications

• Bilingual English / Spanish
• Experience shaping how a team uses Claude Code or comparable agentic tooling on production work
• Prior experience as the embedded technical lead inside a client team
• Significant open-source maintainership or strong public engineering profile (talks, writing, community standing)
• Specific depth in computer vision, hardware-software integration, multi-modal AI, or large-scale data systems
• Prior experience at a top-tier engineering organisation

Logistics

Remote, with overlap to LATAM / US Pacific business hours. This posting is for the contract version of the role, available globally. If you're LATAM-based and prefer a full-time arrangement, see the full-time posting linked from the careers page.

Compensation

• USD $150–$225 per hour, calibrated to engagement scope and experience.
• Looking for an alternative arrangement (fractional, retainer)? Mention it in your application.

What we offer

• Trust-based time off (minimum 4 weeks per year)
• Equipment stipend
• Annual learning and conference budget
• Health coverage per local market