Senior AI Engineer

Who we are The real world is the next frontier, and at Metropolis, we are creating the artificial intelligence to make it responsive. We are pioneering the Recognition Economy — a future where mundane repetition disappears and being known unlocks access, comfort, and belonging everywhere you go. From transforming parking into a seamless drive-in, drive-out experience for millions of Members to expanding our intelligence layer across retail and hospitality, we are building a world that feels instinctive and magical. The future isn’t coming; it’s here, and we need builders, innovators, and problem solvers to help us create it. Who you are Metropolis is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to join our Applied AI organization, a team purpose-built to rebuild how the company operates from an AI-first perspective. Operating as an internal forward-deployed engineer, you will partner closely across business units such as Go-To-Market, Finance, and Operations to translate operational challenges into AI-first engineering solutions. This is a highly autonomous and visible role requiring exceptional communication skills, a deep commercial mindset, and the technical ability to own systems end-to-end, from the LLM prompt layer through to production deployment to directly transform business outcomes. What you'll do • Partner directly with business leaders, operations teams, and Process Analysts to deeply understand their workflows, identify high-impact automation opportunities, and translate ambiguous business challenges into scalable engineering specifications • Prototype, build, and deploy AI-powered applications and agentic workflows that transform manual business processes into seamless AI-first operations • Serve as the technical translator and primary communicator between the Applied AI engineering team and non-technical business units, managing stakeholder expectations and iterating rapidly based on real user feedback • Architect and maintain LLM-based systems in the field, including prompt pipelines, tool-calling integrations, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) setups tailored to specific business use cases • Build and maintain robust data pipelines connecting source systems (Snowflake, internal APIs, SaaS tools) to AI workflows, ensuring data quality and reliability for your stakeholders • Own the end-to-end production reliability and business impact of the systems you deploy, monitoring, alerting, and iterating on AI outputs to ensure continuous value delivery • Evaluate and integrate emerging AI tooling (models, frameworks, APIs) to ensure Metropolis is always leveraging the best available capabilities to solve operational problems What we're looking for • 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and deploying LLM-based or AI-powered applications in production • Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical business leaders and translate their needs into actionable architecture • Strong commercial and product-driven mindset prioritizing business impact and user adoption over theoretical technical perfection • Strong Python skills to write clean, maintainable code and build APIs, data pipelines, and backend services • Practical experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar), prompt engineering, and agentic patterns including function calling, multi-step reasoning, and tool use • Familiarity with data engineering fundamentals including SQL, data transformation, and cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake • Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, or similar) and cloud infrastructure (AWS) • Ability to work highly autonomously in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment, manage competing priorities, and ship iteratively alongside business counterparts While not required, these are a plus: • Previous experience in a Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or highly client/business-facing technical role • Experience with vector databases, embeddings, or semantic search Our Stack • Languages + Frameworks: TypeScript, React, Scala (principally), Java (limited) • Datastores: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Snowflake • Cloud: AWS • Version control: Git & GitHub • AI Tooling: Copilot on GitHub • Observability: Datadog 4 Days in Office: Metropolis values in-person collaboration to drive innovation, strengthen culture, and enhance the Member experience. Our corporate team members hold to our office-first model, which requires employees to be on-site at least four days a week, fostering organic interactions that spark creativity and connection When you join Metropolis, you'll join a team of world-class product leaders and engineers, building an ecosystem of technologies at the intersection of parking, mobility, and real estate. Our goal is to build an inclusive culture where everyone has a voice and the best idea wins. You will play a key role in building and maintaining this culture as our organization grows. The anticipated base salary for this position is $170,000.00 USD to $200,000.00 USD annually. The actual base salary offered is determined by a number of variables, including, as appropriate, the applicant's qualifications for the position, years of relevant experience, distinctive skills, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and the location of residence and/or place of employment. Base salary is one component of Metropolis' total compensation package, which may also include access to or eligibility for healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, a lucrative stock option plan, bonus plans, and more. #LI-CM1 #LI-Onsite Metropolis may utilize an automated employment decision tool (AEDT) to assess or evaluate your candidacy for employment or promotion. AEDTs are used to assist in assessing a candidate’s application relative to the required job qualifications and responsibilities listed in the job posting. As part of this process, Metropolis retains data relevant to your candidacy, including personal information, for a period that is reasonably necessary for the use of the tool. If you are hired for the position, your data may become part of your employee records. Metropolis Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. We make all hiring decisions based on merit, qualifications, and business needs — without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We are committed to providing a welcoming, accessible hiring experience. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application or interview process, please reach out to us at recruiting@metropolis.io.