Staff AI Engineer

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

StockStory, now part of CNBC under VERSANT, is building the next generation of AI-powered equity research for individual investors. This is a chance to build products that can shape how millions of consumers understand markets and make investing decisions.

We offer the best parts of a startup environment - small team, high ownership, fast execution, and room to experiment - with the backing and stability of VERSANT, an independent publicly traded media company.

As an AI engineer, you will work on both an existing AI product with real user impact and greenfield projects with significant room for exploration. The work spans cutting-edge LLMs, large-scale data systems, financial reasoning, and research tooling, with opportunities to apply ideas from functional programming and graph-based systems where they create real advantage.

You will be joining a team of exceptional engineers, analysts, and investors working at the intersection of AI and public markets. A particularly rare part of this role is the level of direct access to experienced market professionals, including former hedge fund managers and top-tier analysts, whose insights can directly inform how you think about modeling, signals, and product design. For an ambitious AI engineer, it is an unusual opportunity to work with cutting-edge LLMs and advanced data systems while learning firsthand how sophisticated investors analyze businesses and markets.

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We're looking for a Staff AI Engineer to help build the next generation of AI-powered equity research.

This role is for engineers who are excited by taking LLM capabilities beyond prototypes and turning them into robust product systems that deliver real value in production. It is especially well suited to people who enjoy designing end-to-end workflows, shaping technical direction, and building reusable foundations that help multiple teams move faster.

You will design, build, and ship LLM-powered systems that integrate into new and existing workflows across the platform, spanning orchestration, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, and operational safeguards. You will also help define the engineering standards and architectural patterns that make these systems reliable, scalable, and maintainable over time.

This role sits within a small and growing, high-caliber team where individuals are expected to operate with a high degree of ownership and autonomy, contributing directly to core product, infrastructure, and AI platform decisions while working closely with engineering and senior leadership in a highly collaborative, low-bureaucracy environment with direct access to decision-makers.

A genuine interest in investing, public markets, and fundamental business analysis is expected.

What We're Looking For:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Minimum of 5 years of experience designing, building, and maintaining software systems
• Excellent backend expertise in at least one strongly typed language, preferably TypeScript
• Solid understanding of cloud computing primitives, especially AWS
• Strong understanding of agentic AI concepts such as tool use, function calling, state machines or graphs, retrieval and reranking, structured outputs, memory, guardrails, and evaluation
• Experience developing and deploying agentic workflows using frameworks such as LangChain, Mastra, or LangGraph

What You'll Do:

• Build end-to-end distributed agentic AI solutions that are reliable and scalable
• Lead cross-functional initiatives requiring coordination across multiple teams and shared systems
• Mentor other engineers and define quality standards and best practices
• Own long-term maintainability, observability, and cost efficiency of AI systems
• Monitor model quality drift, prompt alignment, alerting, and operational health

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Minimum of 5 years of experience designing, building, and maintaining software systems
• Excellent backend expertise in at least one strongly typed language, preferably TypeScript
• Solid understanding of cloud computing primitives, especially AWS
• Strong understanding of agentic AI concepts such as tool use, function calling, state machines or graphs, retrieval and reranking, structured outputs, memory, guardrails, and evaluation
• Experience developing and deploying agentic workflows using frameworks such as LangChain, Mastra, or LangGraph
• Prior experience leading an AI systems team
• Experience shipping and operating multiple GenAI or LLM systems in production
• Hands-on experience debugging scaled LLM systems and participating in incident response
• Experience building human-in-the-loop evaluation pipelines
• Experience with RAG, embeddings, and model fine-tuning
• Experience implementing evaluation suites for agentic systems running in production

Location:

On-site, Prague, Czech Republic.

Disclaimer: Please note that while this role is hosted by Versant, the successful candidate will be employed through a company called “Remote Technology Czech S.R.O”, who is an Employer of Record (EOR). “Remote Technology Czech S.R.O” will be responsible for all local employment matters, including payroll, statutory benefits, and compliance with Czech employment legislation. Day-to-day work, performance expectations, and collaboration will be aligned to Versant’s business and team structure.

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to [email protected].

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.