Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer (Agentic AI)

Location: Calgary, Alberta (Remote-Friendly)

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our Conversational AI & Agents practice. You'll build agentic chat experiences that enable effective customer interactions.

As a senior contributor, you'll own full-stack development from design to release. You'll work with cross-functional teams to define architecture, shape product experiences, and build applications using modern best practices.

Key Responsibilities

Agentic AI Solution Architecture & Feature Development

· Evaluate the LLM/tooling landscape and choose the right model, framework, and runtime for each job.

· Work productively in modern AI-first dev environments such as Cursor, Zed, and IDEs with AI assistants like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot.

· Architect clean, modular, and reusable agentic systems that scale, are easy to evolve, and increase team throughput.

· Build and harden RAG and agent pipelines end to end - retrieval, orchestration, tool use, guardrails, telemetry, and evals.

· Continuously improve performance, cost, accessibility, reliability, and maintainability.

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

· Mentor engineers on agent frameworks and conversational UI best practices.

· Collaborate with product managers, designers, and stakeholders on technical direction.

· Make architectural decisions emphasizing scalability, robustness, and reliability.

· Set coding standards, architecture patterns, documentation quality, and operational practices, maintain code quality through reviews, testing, and documentation standards.

· Ensure delivery excellence - clear roadmaps, realistic plans, risk management, and crisp execution.

· Align with Robots & Pencils AI principles, client guidelines for AI development and deployment, safe and responsible AI practices.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

· Work closely with product managers, designers, user experience professionals, and platform engineers to define requirements and success criteria.

· Participate in backlog grooming, sprint planning, QA reviews, incident response, and RCA.

· Operate within agile processes to hit dates without trading away quality or stability.

Offshore Team Collaboration

· Coordinate with offshore team members to ensure consistent delivery and high code quality.

· Share architectural guidance, codebase documentation, and technical artifacts across distributed teams.

· Support time zone-aware collaboration and unblock developers as needed to maintain momentum.

Required Skills & Qualifications

· Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

· 7+ years of professional software development with significant ownership of architecture and delivery.

· 3+ years of Python in ML/AI systems, including PyTorch or TensorFlow.

· 1+ years building with Generative AI: LLM agents, prompt engineering, LangGraph, LangChain.

· Hands-on RAG experience - semantic chunking, metadata enrichment, embeddings, retrieval quality, and latency/cost tuning.

· Experience with vector stores such as pgvector, Weaviate, or Chroma.

· Understanding of modern AI interoperability standards such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and AI communication standards.

· Strong cloud and IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) background - AWS, Azure, or GCP - plus containerization and distributed systems fundamentals.

· Strong AWS expertise: services, solid grasp of compute, networking, storage, security, and container platforms.

· Solid SDLC practices - testing strategies, CI/CD, code reviews, observability, and incident management.

· Upper-intermediate English, written and spoken.

Nice to Have

· Knowledge of advanced RAG patterns - Adaptive RAG, Agentic RAG, Self-RAG - and retrieval evaluation methods.

· Experience building agentic applications with LangGraph, LangChain, or AutoGen, familiarity with patterns and techniques such as ReAct (Reason + Act), Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts.

· MLOps/AIOps exposure - model deployment, lifecycle, governance, safety, red-teaming, data/privacy controls, prompt/version management, offline and online evals using managed services and/or Docker/Kubernetes with MLOps best practices.

· Experience with LLM fine-tuning techniques - SFT, RLHF, DPO, PEFT, LoRA/QLoRA - on hyperscalers' platforms like AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, or Azure ML.

· Experience with production support and/or deployment on AWS, Azure, or GCP using modern CI/CD.

· Front-end skills useful for chat UX - TypeScript, , real-time messaging, and design systems.

Personal Competencies

· Accountability – Owns full stack delivery with quality, reliability, and attention to detail.

· Adaptability – Thrives in dynamic, fast-paced client environments.

· Collaboration – Builds strong partnerships across teams and time zones.

· Execution-Focused – Delivers maintainable, scalable solutions without overengineering.

· Innovation-Minded – Brings curiosity and experimentation to technology decisions.

· Craftsmanship – Cares deeply about code quality, architecture, and user experience.

Why Join Robots & Pencils?

We don't just ship features, we build digital-first products that matter. As a Senior Engineer, you'll join a team that values deep craft, cross-functional collaboration, and relentless focus on quality. You'll work on impactful agentic AI applications using modern technologies, while influencing engineering culture and best practices across the organization.