Surface Pattern Designer Jobs in Maryland (NOW HIRING)

The Role
We are looking for a pragmatic builder-architect - a senior engineer who ships fast without leaving a mess, and makes architectural choices that hold up as the product scales. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: roughly 40% writing code and prototyping, with the remainder spent on architecture, mentoring, and raising the engineering bar within your team.
You will embed with a product team for extended periods, owning technical direction and building AI-powered features end-to-end - from idea through production. You won't just advise; you'll build, and what you build will set the pattern for others. You may end up managing some engineers.
Most engineers lean one way. "Hackers" ship fast but accrue debt; "architects" build clean abstractions but stall on delivery. You are both. You know when to prototype loosely and when to invest in the durable version - and you can articulate why.
What You'll Do

• Design and build AI-powered product features - agent architectures, RAG pipelines, model orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails - with the same engineering rigor as any production system: testable, observable, gracefully degrading.
• Own the full stack for the features you build - application code, data, infrastructure - making end-to-end decisions about deployment, observability, cost, and security.
• Make architectural choices that optimize for reversibility early and durability when the problem is actually understood.
• Mentor and coach engineers on your team, transferring judgment and mental models, not just answers. Calibrate involvement to stakes: get out of the way for cheap-to-reverse work, lean in for load-bearing decisions.
• Read existing systems as accumulated knowledge before treating them as debt. Understand why things are shaped the way they are before proposing changes.
• Identify and manage the blast radius of technical decisions - the dangerous ones at this level aren't bad deployments, they're bad directions.

What We're Looking For
Engineering Judgment

• You think in failure modes and second-order effects, not happy paths and demos. "Who inherits this, and what does it cost them if I'm wrong?" is a question you ask naturally.
• You optimize for sustainability - testability, clear boundaries, sane defaults, documentation - so what you build can be owned and extended by others.
• You treat constraints as the design problem. You map what's frozen, what's validated, what other systems depend on, and what can't take downtime before proposing solutions.

AI Engineering

• You have built and shipped AI-powered features in production - not just used AI tooling for personal productivity.
• You treat AI systems as engineering problems: versioned, evaluated, observable, and designed to degrade gracefully when models behave unexpectedly.
• You use AI as a force multiplier on judgment you already have - it accelerates the parts you understand well, precisely because you can evaluate the output.
• You use AI to compress the learning loop, not skip it. You build real mental models of new technology, using AI as an accelerant, not a crutch.

Working with Teams

• You transfer judgment, not just answers. You surface reasoning, install mental models, and make yourself progressively less necessary.
• You lead through demonstrated competence, not positional authority - and you know that doing the work yourself is sometimes the failure mode.
• You learn the team's context, constraints, and history before injecting opinions. You earn trust by understanding what came before.

Learning

• You learn to a depth proportional to the decision. Evaluating something? Defensible opinion, move on. Committing the product to it? Deep enough to understand failure modes and sharp edges.
• When you pick up new technology, you're trying to understand why it works the way it does and what problem its designers were solving - because that's what transfers.

Technical Environment
Our stack spans the following. We don't expect mastery of all of it - but given the role, you should be able to pick up almost any of it quickly.

• Cloud: AWS (primary) - architecture and infrastructure
• Front-end: React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, BlockNote, Nginx
• Back-end: Node.js, Next.js, Python, Kafka, FastAPI, Dramatiq + Valkey (task queue), PynamoDB (single-table DynamoDB), SQLAlchemy async + asyncpg (PostgreSQL), Prometheus, MongoDB
• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), AWS CDK (TypeScript), ECS Fargate, DynamoDB, S3, RDS, Elasticache Valkey, Bedrock, Secrets Manager, SSM
• DevOps: NX, pnpm, GitHub Actions, GHCR, Docker/Buildx, Wiz, GitHub OIDC
• AI Infrastructure: Google ADK, LiteLLM, OpenRouter, Bedrock (KB, BDA, Guardrails), MCP, Langfuse + OpenTelemetry, RAGAS, specialist domain agents
• AI Tooling: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, opencode, Hermes Agent

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree
• Minimum 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with meaningful time spent at a senior/staff/principal level owning technical direction.
• Production experience building AI-powered features - agent systems, RAG, model orchestration, or similar. Not just prompting or fine-tuning in isolation.
• Strong full-stack capability - comfortable across application code, data stores, and infrastructure. You don't need to be an expert in all three, but you can't treat any of them as someone else's problem.
• Experience with AWS at scale - you've designed, deployed, and operated production systems on AWS, not just used it for personal projects.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate other engineers - through pairing, design review, or informal technical leadership.

Nice to Have

• Experience in regulated industries (healthcare, pharma, finance) where compliance constraints shape technical decisions.
• Background building multi-agent or agentic AI systems in production.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (CDK, Terraform, Pulumi) and container orchestration (EKS, ECS).
• Experience working in product-led engineering organizations where engineers own outcomes, not just outputs.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to encourage life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.
The annual base pay for this position ranges from $172,466.00 - $258,700.00 USD Annual. Hourly and salaried non-exempt employees will also be paid overtime pay when working qualifying overtime hours. Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition, our positions offer a short-term incentive bonus opportunity; eligibility to participate in our equity-based long-term incentive program (salaried roles), to receive a retirement contribution (hourly roles), and commission payment eligibility (sales roles). Benefits offered included a qualified retirement program [401(k) plan]; paid vacation and holidays; paid leaves; and, health benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage in accordance with the terms and conditions of the applicable plans. Additional details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an "at-will position" and the Company reserves the right to modify base pay (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.
Are you ready to bring new insights and fresh thinking to the table? Fantastic! We have one seat available, and we hope it's yours. Apply today.
Date Posted
04-Aug-2026
Closing Date
23-Aug-2026
Our mission is to build an inclusive environment where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and employees. In furtherance of that mission, we welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of their protected characteristics. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please complete the corresponding section in the application form.