Senior AI Engineer

About the role

Patsnap, a global pre-IPO company that uses domain-specific AI to help IP and R&D teams collaborate across the innovation lifecycle, is looking for a Senior AI Engineer to build the technical foundation of its next phase of AI transformation. The role designs and develops the knowledge and context infrastructure that connects internal information and powers intelligent tools and AI-driven workflows. It is a highly hands-on, high-ownership position covering LLM application architecture, RAG, retrieval, knowledge systems, context management and full-stack AI development, and it is an in-office position in the Singapore office.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build the company-wide AI knowledge infrastructure, including the company wiki, internal knowledge base, retrieval layer and context management system.
• Develop scalable LLM application architecture, including RAG pipelines, vector database integration, prompt workflows, API services, monitoring and deployment.
• Own end-to-end delivery of internal AI tools, from backend architecture and basic frontend integration to deployment, testing and monitoring.
• Work with business, brand, PR, IR and leadership stakeholders to turn ambiguous needs into practical AI systems and technical roadmaps.
• Optimize system performance, including token efficiency, latency, caching strategy, retrieval quality, data architecture and model inference flow.
• Evaluate and integrate AI coding tools, LLM frameworks, vector databases and third-party APIs to improve development efficiency and product quality.
• Mentor junior engineers or interns and help establish technical standards, documentation practices and reusable engineering workflows.

Required profile

• 4-7 years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years of hands-on LLM application development.
• Production-level LLM application experience, including prompt engineering at scale, model selection, inference pipeline design or RAG architecture.
• Experience owning full engineering delivery, including backend services, basic frontend integration, API deployment, monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Heavy use of AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot.
• Mandarin fluency and English working proficiency required; able to work independently under ambiguous instructions.

Required skills

• Strong backend development in Python; Node.js or Go is a plus.
• Computer science fundamentals: algorithms, system design, database design, API architecture, distributed systems, caching and performance optimization.
• RAG and vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate or Chroma.