Staff AI engineer

At Connectly we are building the future of conversational commerce in Latin America with the focus on Whatsapp. Buying on Whatsapp is ubiquitous in Latin America, yet only small businesses have made it truly seamless by asking real people to respond to Whatsapp messages. We at Connectly are building an AI-powered sales platform for large retailers. We’re a VC-backed Series B startup with a world-class team from Meta, Google, Uber, and other leading Silicon Valley companies. We operate as a hybrid organization, with offices in Bogotá and San Francisco, and distributed teams across Latin America, including Brazil, where many of our AI initiatives are based. Job summary - We are seeking an accomplished and visionary Staff AI Engineer to lead Connectly’s company-wide technical strategy for AI systems and infrastructure. This position reports directly to the CTO and plays a central role in shaping how Connectly’s technology, architecture, and AI capabilities evolve to serve millions of retail customers across Latin America. You will drive the design, development, and deployment of large-scale AI systems, leading the company’s efforts to innovate at the intersection of machine learning, conversational interfaces, and enterprise integration. This role blends deep hands-on technical work with strategic leadership, requiring an engineer who can operate across multiple levels of abstraction, from model tuning and latency optimization to long-term architecture and platform vision. Responsibilities include: - Define and execute the technical strategy for Connectly’s AI platform in collaboration with the CTO and senior leadership. - Architect, build, and launch production-grade AI systems that power customer-facing conversational experiences at scale. - Lead technical alignment across AI, infrastructure, and application engineering teams spanning Brazil, Bogotá, and San Francisco. - Experiment with and deploy advanced LLMs to address business use cases including retrieval-augmen