Middle AI Engineer (GenAI Deployment)

Location: Lviv, Ukraine

Company Overview

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.

Position Overview

We're looking for an AI Engineer to contribute to the development and delivery of AI/ML systems. This role is ideal for an early-career engineer who is comfortable writing code, eager to take on real responsibility, and ready to grow their craft.
In this role, you will work as a contributing member of a cross-functional team, building and supporting AI/ML models, pipelines, and the systems around them. You'll take ownership of well-scoped tasks, learn from more senior engineers, and steadily expand the surface area you can confidently deliver on. You'll be joining real, in-flight work where reliability and quality matter. You'll collaborate closely with experienced engineers to build new capabilities, improve existing systems, and develop the technical instincts that come from shipping things that matter.

What You'll Do

• Productionize and deploy already-built GenAI agents into the client's cloud environment (Azure primary, AWS as a fallback for specific components)
• Own MCP (Model Context Protocol) server architecture and deployment — hosting decisions, a container-first strategy with Docker, and resilience issues like manual-restart dependencies
• Deploy prediction-serving APIs — containerize and host FastAPI-style services wrapping ML models
• Set up CI/CD for agent and API deployments within the client's GitHub Enterprise
• Manage cloud environment setup: Azure ML workspace configuration, compute provisioning, quota/capacity troubleshooting, and access management
• Implement basic observability: logging, health checks, and alerting
• Document deployment architecture and known limitations clearly, for the client and internal handoff
• Good to have: build an ML model for demand prediction based on historical data

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with hands-on exposure to AI/ML systems and generative AI development
• Solid software engineering foundation (Python or similar)
• Hands-on Docker/containerization experience — able to design a deployment architecture from scratch, not just follow one
• Cloud experience with Azure (App Service, Container Apps, ML workspaces) and/or AWS (EC2, ECS), comfortable weighing trade-offs between the two
• Experience deploying and operating LLM-based agents or GenAI applications in a real client/production setting, not just prototyping
• Familiarity with MCP or a comparable agent-tool-orchestration pattern
• CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Comfortable operating inside a client's enterprise environment (GitHub Enterprise, Azure AD/SSO, sandboxed subscriptions)
• A strong collaborator who works closely alongside a Data Scientist/ML Engineer, not behind a ticket queue

Nice to Have

• Prior MLOps experience: model versioning, drift monitoring, retraining pipelines
• Azure SQL or general data-engineering-adjacent experience
• Consulting/client-services background, comfortable with ambiguity and shifting scope

You’ll Do Well Here if You Are

• A doer. You see something broken and fix it. You'd rather move on clarity than wait for certainty.
• A fast learner who knows you don't know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You're senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway.
• Direct in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You'd rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke.
• Obsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don't put your name on work you wouldn't stand behind.
• Built for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing.
• All in. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
• Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you.
• Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work

We Offer

• 20 days of paid vacation.
• 15 days of unpaid vacation.
• All official public holidays off.
• 5 paid sick days without a doctor's certificate.
• Medical insurance.
• Military draft deferment (reservation) support.
• Cooperation under a gig-contract.

Why Join Robots & Pencils?

At Robots & Pencils, we don't just build software - we solve meaningful business problems through creative technology. You'll work alongside passionate engineers, designers, and strategists in a remote-friendly, collaborative environment. With our expansion into Ukraine, now is the perfect time to join our growing global team and contribute to high-impact work from day one.