{"id":698706,"url":"https://alion.io/job/wati-io-staff-ai-engineer","title":"Staff AI Engineer","company":{"id":19796,"name":"Wati","domain":"wati.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/wati-io","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":93,"open_postings":62,"ghost_share":0.032,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":174,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Shenzhen, China","Hong Kong"],"countries":["CN","HK"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":56000,"max_usd":128000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1148},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Gemini","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LiveKit","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Milvus","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Pinecone","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Qdrant","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"WebRTC","optional":false},{"name":"WhatsApp","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-09T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T11:43:17Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":193,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":193},"description":"About Wati\nStarted as a WhatsApp team inbox in 2020, Wati has evolved into an AI-powered customer engagement platform that goes beyond a single channel. Designed for businesses that sell, support, and grow through conversations, Wati observes customer intent in real time, decides the next best revenue action, and executes it across marketing, sales, and support - on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, SMS, and more.\nTrusted by over 16,000 customers across 190+ countries, Wati simplifies complex operations and business conversations with a unified inbox, no-code automation, and our intelligent AI layer, Astra.\nProudly backed by Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Shopify, and recognised as a Premium Partner of Meta and Google.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re hiring a Staff AI Engineer to own LLM orchestration, RAG, and agent infrastructure at 4B+ messages/year scale.\nOur platform processes over 4 billion messages per year across 100+ countries. Your mission is to build the robust, scalable, and intelligent systems that turn conversation data into real-time, intelligent customer experiences.\nIn this role, you will lead the architecture, deployment, and optimization of our LLM-driven services - including multi-provider inference orchestration, RAG pipelines, multi-agent workflows, and voice AI. This is a senior IC role with significant technical influence across the AI stack.\nWe need a \"builder\" who can bridge the gap between complex AI capabilities and massive-scale production environments, ensuring our AI is fast, reliable, and cost-effective.\nWhat You Will Own\nCore LLM Infrastructure: Architect and lead our AI production stack, including multi-provider LLM gateway optimization, token budget management, and low-latency inference routing across OpenAI, Gemini, and other providers.\nAgentic AI & RAG: Design and implement scalable RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, multi-step AI agent workflows, and tool-calling infrastructure (MCP), ensuring high accuracy and reliability in customer interactions.\nVoice & Multimodal AI: Lead the evolution of our voice AI layer (WebRTC/realtime) and cross-channel agent coordination across text, voice, and connected messaging platforms.\nAI Production Lifecycles: Own the \"Engineering-to-AI\" loop: building automated pipelines for data collection, cleaning, fine-tuning orchestration, and model versioning.\nPerformance & Cost Optimization: Continuously optimize API costs, token budgets, latency, and caching strategies to ensure our 4-billion-message scale remains sustainable and performant.\nEvaluation & Benchmarking: Build the infrastructure for systematic AI quality assessment, identifying failure modes and ensuring model improvements are grounded in real-world production metrics.\nTechnical Roadmap: Drive technology decisions in close collaboration with engineering leadership, selecting frameworks and architectural patterns that will define our AI future.\nRequirements\nWhat We Are Looking For\nSystems Expert: 5+ years of professional experience in backend or infrastructure engineering. Mastery of at least one high-performance language (Go, Rust, or C++) and deep proficiency in Python.\nAI Deployment Mastery: Proven track record of taking LLMs/NLP models from experiments to high-traffic production. You understand multi-provider orchestration, prompt engineering at scale, and model drift management.\nData Pipeline Experience: Strong experience building data pipelines for AI workloads, including document processing, embedding generation, and vector search.\nProduct-Minded Engineer: You don’t just build for the sake of tech; you understand how AI performance impacts customer outcomes and business value.\nAutonomous Builder: You thrive in environments with high ambiguity and can design, code, and deploy complex systems independently.\nExperience with vector databases (e.g., Qdrant, Milvus, Pinecone) and RAG architecture patterns.\nFamiliarity with agentic frameworks, tool-calling protocols (MCP, function calling), or multi-agent orchestration.\nExperience with real-time voice/audio AI pipelines (WebRTC, LiveKit, or similar).\nInfrastructure-as-Code experience with GCP/AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes.\nBenefits\nYou’ll own AI quality across a platform that serves 16,000+ businesses in 190+ countries. The data pipeline and production infrastructure are in place - your job is to push the frontier: better models, smarter agents, faster inference, and measurable business impact.\nYou’ll have direct access to the founding team and the autonomy to shape our AI roadmap. This is a rare IC opportunity to own AI end-to-end at production scale, with real data, real customer impact, and a direct line to product decisions.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4711,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marketing Automation","Conversational AI","Customer Support & Help Desk Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T02:26:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":34,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.775,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":193,"expected_fill_days":174,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/wati-io-staff-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/wati-io-staff-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T13:44:28Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":9850,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":19796},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=19796"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fwati-io-staff-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fwati-io-staff-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fwati-io-staff-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/wati-io-staff-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fwati-io-staff-ai-engineer"}]}