VP – Distinguished Engineer of Generative AI Engineering

ABOUT SLATE

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Design and own the end-to-end GenAI platform: context layer, data layer, model serving, agent frameworks, and evaluation pipelines. Architecture decisions here must hold at enterprise scale, across multiple product lines, manufacturing sites, and a growing engineering organization. This means designing for reliability, cost efficiency, and extensibility from day one, not retrofitting those properties after the fact.

• Build Industry-Leading AI Systems. Design systems that practitioners at frontier AI labs would recognize as technically sound, applied to physical manufacturing: novel approaches to context management, agentic coordination across physical and digital systems, and model personalization on proprietary manufacturing data.

• Drive Physical AI Across the Vehicle Program. Take AI beyond the laptop. Slate's vehicles are built in the real world, by real robots, on a factory floor that generates sensor data, failure modes, and edge cases that no benchmark captures. You will embed AI directly into manufacturing: robotic process control, computer vision for quality assurance, predictive maintenance systems, and closed-loop feedback between physical production and model behavior. The goal is to dramatically improve to design and build a new vehicle.

• Build Slate's Proprietary Data and Context Layer. Construct a knowledge base of agentic, human, robotic, and enterprise decisions that compounds over time. Build the unified Data Layer that trains purpose-built models on real Slate decisions across the vehicle lifecycle. You are responsible for the architecture of both.

• Ship Agentic Systems Across the Company. Deploy production-grade AI agents across vehicle engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, software development, and GTM. These are not prototypes or proof-of-concepts: they are systems that run workflows that previously required humans, at a quality level that earns trust. You will establish evaluation frameworks, guardrail standards, and observability practices that make these systems auditable.

• Lead by Building. Recruit and grow a lean team of GenAI engineers, MLOps engineers, and applied scientists. Stay in the code: review PRs, make architecture calls, and ship alongside the team. Your technical judgment sets the quality bar.

• Set the Engineering Standard. Establish the technical standards, practices, and hiring bar for the GenAI organization. Contribute externally where appropriate: open-source, publications, or conference talks.

• Hands-on. You have built GenAI systems from scratch in production and you still write code. You can point to specific systems you personally designed that are running at scale today. You are not afraid to directly interact with stakeholders to understand and develop requirements.

• An architect at scale. You have designed enterprise-level platforms that serve thousands of internal users, integrate with dozens of upstream and downstream systems, and hold up under operational stress. You know what breaks at scale before it breaks, because you have seen it break before.

• A Physical AI practitioner (preferred). You have applied AI to physical systems: robotics, manufacturing, IoT, autonomous vehicles, or another domain where data is messy, latency constraints are real, and failure modes have physical consequences.

• GenAI native. Deep hands-on experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, RAG, and fine-tuning. Strong opinions about what works in production, grounded in having shipped it.

• Technically credible at the architecture level. You can translate a product requirement into a concrete system design with defensible tradeoffs, and operate effectively at the frontier of what is currently buildable.

• Comfortable in a resource-constrained environment. You build systems that perform above their weight, make pragmatic calls under uncertainty, and move fast without accumulating architectural debt that stalls the team later.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 15+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years shipping production GenAI systems and 7+ years in a senior technical leadership role. Candidates are expected to have work that is recognized outside their own organization.

• BS required. MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or a related field preferred. Exceptional track record beats pedigree. Candidates without advanced degrees who have published, built widely-adopted systems, or otherwise demonstrated research-level thinking through their work will be evaluated accordingly.

• Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and open-source model deployment at production scale.Vector databases, agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), and prompt engineering for reliability, not just capability.

• Fine-tuning and training purpose-built models for domain-specific tasks, including the tradeoff analysis between hosted APIs, open-source models, and custom training across cost, latency, and IP dimensions.

• Evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and observability pipelines for GenAI in production: the ability to know whether a system is working, not just whether it is running.

• Experience designing and deploying multi-agent systems in production, including coordination protocols, failure isolation, and human-in-the-loop escalation paths.

• Candidates with this background will move faster in the role; those without it should expect to develop it on the job. Deploying AI systems that operate on physical hardware: robots, CNC machines, quality inspection systems, assembly line sensors, or equivalent industrial environments.

• Computer vision systems for manufacturing quality assurance: defect detection, dimensional inspection, or process monitoring at production-line throughput.

• Closed-loop learning systems where model behavior is updated based on physical world outcomes, including approaches to safe online learning in environments where errors have physical consequences.

• Robot-to-model feedback architectures: designing systems where robotic process data improves model performance and model outputs improve robotic process control.

• Familiarity with physical simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or similar) for model development and validation before factory deployment.

• Sensor fusion and multimodal data handling for environments with structured sensor data, unstructured imaging, and natural language interfaces operating simultaneously.

• Designing real-time inference pipelines with hard latency constraints and failure consequences, including edge deployment architectures that operate under intermittent connectivity.

• Data architecture for AI at scale: modern data stacks (Snowflake, Databricks, dbt), vector stores, and streaming data pipelines that handle both batch and real-time model consumption. Cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure at the architecture level, including cost modeling, capacity planning, and the tradeoffs between managed AI services and self-hosted infrastructure.

• Designing and owning AI platforms that serve enterprise-scale internal usage: thousands of concurrent users, dozens of integrated systems, and SLA requirements that real operations depend on.

  Multi-tenant model serving architectures with cost isolation, quota management, and workload prioritization across competing internal consumers. Cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure at the architecture level, including cost modeling, capacity planning, and the tradeoffs between managed AI services and self-hosted infrastructure. Security and compliance architecture for AI systems handling proprietary manufacturing IP, including data residency, access controls, and audit trails.

  Platform engineering practices that make GenAI accessible and reliable for internal teams who are not AI practitioners: SDKs, abstraction layers, and self-service tooling.

SALARY RANGE

The compensation for this position is the range Slate reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for the position taking into account the wide variety of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including job-related knowledge; skillset; experience, education and training; certifications; work location; and other relevant business and organizational factors.

Total Base Pay Range- $222,431.00 - $370,719.00

Additional Compensation and Benefits: Slate offers a wide range of competitive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability insurance, vacation, and 401k. The successful candidate may also be eligible to participate in the equity program and/or a discretionary annual incentive program, subject to the rules governing such programs.

WHY JOIN TEAM SLATE?

At Slate, we’re fueled by grit, determination, and attention to detail. The start-up spirit of ingenuity and resourcefulness move our business forward. Team Slate fosters a culture of excellence, innovation, and mutual respect, and is motivated by shared principles.

• Safety First

• Delight Customers

• One Team

• Relentless Improvement

• Fast, Frugal, and Scrappy

• Respectful Collaboration

• Positive Legacy

WE WANT TO WORK WITH PEOPLE THAT REFLECT THE COMMUNITIES IN WHICH WE OPERATE.

Slate is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, parental status, cultural background, organizational level, work styles, tenure and life experiences. Or for any other reason.

Slate is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at

[email protected].