[Remote] Lead AI Engineer, Work From Home

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Nextdoor is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to own the design, development, and delivery of production AI systems across their backend and workflow automation stack. This fully remote role involves leading engineering decisions, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of production AI systems powering insurance workflow automation
• Architect AI orchestration layers connecting LLMs, backend services, and business workflows
• Own end-to-end AI system design, including inference pipelines, routing, caching, and fallback strategies
• Drive engineering decisions around latency, reliability, cost, and scalability of AI services
• Lead implementation of Observability Systems (logging, monitoring, tracing, alerting)
• Review and guide backend AI implementation across engineering teams
• Collaborate with product, backend, DevOps, and operations teams to ship end-to-end AI features
• Debug complex production issues across distributed AI systems and lead root-cause analysis
• Define engineering standards and best practices for AI system development
• Mentor engineers and elevate technical execution quality across teams

Skills

• Strong backend or AI engineering experience in production environments
• Experience building or scaling AI systems (LLMs, embeddings, recommendation systems, or automation workflows)
• Strong system design skills with experience in distributed systems
• Experience with production inference pipelines and AI orchestration
• Strong debugging ability in high-scale, latency-sensitive environments
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response
• Proven ability to lead technical execution in cross-functional teams
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to drive projects end-to-end
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, globally distributed teams
• Tech Stack: Anthropic, Distributed Systems Tools, Docker, Kubernetes, LLM APIs, Node.js, NoSQL, Observability Stack (Logging, Metrics, Tracing), OpenAI, Open-Source Models, Python, and SQL

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental
• Vision
• Savings Plan Options
• PTO

Company Overview

Nextdoor is a private social networking platform that connects neighbors for them to exchange helpful information, goods, and services. It was founded in 2011, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is http://nextdoor.com.

Company H1B Sponsorship

Nextdoor has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 7 in 2026, 44 in 2025, 31 in 2024, 53 in 2023, 39 in 2022, 36 in 2021, 20 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.