Republic Services is the second largest environmental services companies in North America — ~40K employees, thousands of trucks, hundreds of facilities, and a mountain of operational data that has never had an AI layer on top of it. We have a backlog of hundreds of Agentic AI ideas that we need to deliver and a foundation of ontologies, evaluations, guardrails, etc... that we need to build.
We're hiring a Staff Engineer now to be the first hire and plan to expand the team aggressively. You will own that platform end to end, not manage the people.
What you'll work on
- Agent orchestration: tool calling, planner/executor and multi-agent patterns, MCP/A2A integrations with enterprise systems
- Making enterprise context reliably available at inference time — retrieval, memory, hybrid search, reranking, access controls
- LLMOps that isn't hand-wavy: evals and golden datasets, prompt/agent versioning, tracing, token and cost budgets, CI/CD for agents
- Safety in a regulated enterprise: prompt injection, data exfiltration, PII handling, human-in-the-loop, audit logging
You should have
- 7–10+ years building and scaling production systems, with recent, hands-on GenAI/agentic work in production (not just demos)
- Shipped agents or LLM pipelines at scale
- Solid data chops — vector stores, chunking, hybrid search, knowing when retrieval is the wrong answer
- Cloud experience (we're primarily AWS / Bedrock); comfortable with both containers and serverless
- Track record of technical leadership and mentoring without needing a manager title
Comp & benefits: $175k is our midpoint for salary + 20% annual target bonus, 401(k) with company match, ESPP, medical/dental/vision, PTO. Remote eligible, prefer AZ timezones +/-1. Not sponsorship eligible.
Why you should want to work here: We build cool stuff
email me (jgardner@republicservices.com) directly with the most interesting agent you've shipped.
I'm building an app that aggregates music events in my area. I got tired of trying to manually search different web sites, instagram, etc. So it scrapes a bunch of websites and APIs plus some LLM-magic sprinkled in to create https://riffraff.show
We may consider strong candidates outside of Arizona, but we are hoping to find someone that can come into the office on occasion so we prefer Az based.
This role does not have an in-office requirement but would need to come in for certain meetings/events, likely once a week.
We are not sponsoring Visas at this time
Salary mid point: $165k + 20% bonus target (depends on company performance)
Republic Services | AI Staff Engineer | WFH in Arizona preferably, will consider remote | $132,600- $182,250 + Bonus
We’re hiring an AI Staff Engineer to help lead the next wave of enterprise software built with GenAI and agentic AI. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can combine strong engineering depth with real business partnership and influence across product, data, architecture, and executive stakeholders.
You’ll work closely with business leaders, product managers, and data scientists to identify high-value opportunities where AI can reduce friction, improve efficiency, lower risk, and create measurable business impact. A big part of the role is translating ambiguous business problems into practical AI-enabled solutions and helping leaders make smart decisions about where and how to invest.
On the technical side, you’ll design and build core services, APIs, and orchestration pipelines that connect LLMs and agentic workflows to enterprise data, systems, and digital platforms. You’ll provide technical direction to distributed engineering teams, lead design and code quality practices, and help teams ship secure, scalable, production-grade solutions.
You’ll also play a key leadership role in shaping platform standards around reliability, observability, governance, and responsible AI. We want someone who can partner credibly with senior leaders, drive execution across teams, and turn GenAI from experimentation into durable business value.
I would love to chat about how I could help your mission. I'm an independent software developer that has spent my entire career working in waste. Former VP of Engineering at Routeware and now doing consulting with haulers to achieve exactly what you describe here: business process automation with agentic solutions. My current project (https://getklau.com) is all about wrapping roll-off dispatching with agentic tools to help dispatchers make better decisions and drive more value (disposal arbitrage is the big unlock here).
I have a new role open on my team: Staff Engineer – GenAI. We’re building an enterprise-grade Agentic AI platform that helps teams build, integrate, and operationalize GenAI solutions quickly, with minimal friction. The challenge is making it work in the real world: enterprise architecture, security/compliance, governance, and operational excellence. If you’ve been the “high-leverage IC” who builds platforms other teams depend on—APIs, orchestration, standards, dev experience—this is worth a look. https://jobs.republicservices.com/us/en/job/R-174485/Staff-E...
Location: Remote in the US with a preference for people Arizona (but not mandatory)
Hey dec-fairstreet, would you be interested in someone that could be part-time (say 20-ish hours a week). I know node, TS, and AWS very well. Not much react, but I do some Angular and have done a lot of RDMS but not postgres specifically
I have been searching for something similar. It seems like in the 90s up to the 2010s-ish there were some great books on the subject (code complete, pragmatic programmer, clean code, etc.). But I have yet to find a book of similar caliber that is a modern version of those books. Would love to see what others are reading along these line, books or other wise.
This is actually the "best" answer for our plastics problem. There was an NPR/Planet Money podcast on it recently here: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land and there are plenty of other sources that all agree on this premise. I have worked in waste management a few years ago and recycling is not the long-term solution.
> The utility of oil-based fuels is the energy density in combustion. Burning plastic doesn't come close to the same exchange.
The energy density of plastic (by weight, not volume) is virtually identical to that of oil.
Yes, the machine used to burn oil vs plastic looks different, but coal plants can burn plastic without much modification - and they would be much much cleaner than coal when they do so.
> The energy density of plastic (by weight, not volume) is virtually identical to that of oil.
Oil-based unleaded fuel is not oil. You probably could run trains on plastic. That's if you didn't mind hot plastic raining down around the tracks as the coal dust and soot did when we used it for trains.
We don’t burn oil though. We burn natural gas, in highly-efficient turbines. Burning oil and coal is obsolete technology that we are trying to phase out.
Even more to the point: we can avoid digging coal from the ground, which burns even dirtier than plastics trash.
And even in the lofty goal end state of zero fossils, if it's not a complete collapse back to medieval tech (and population numbers), we would likely end up with biomass based plastics serving as packaging and the like at the upper end of that carbon's energy slope, before utilizing the remaining bound energy in an incinerator.
Biodegradable properties of grown plastics are only a last line of defense against pollution when collection has failed.
You do have significant differences between noxious fumes and clean burning between burning plastic vs burning fossil fuels. The energy captured from the burn is obviously not the same - same reason you can't just set fire to a "bowl" of plastic.
Republic Services is the second largest environmental services companies in North America — ~40K employees, thousands of trucks, hundreds of facilities, and a mountain of operational data that has never had an AI layer on top of it. We have a backlog of hundreds of Agentic AI ideas that we need to deliver and a foundation of ontologies, evaluations, guardrails, etc... that we need to build.
We're hiring a Staff Engineer now to be the first hire and plan to expand the team aggressively. You will own that platform end to end, not manage the people.
What you'll work on
- Agent orchestration: tool calling, planner/executor and multi-agent patterns, MCP/A2A integrations with enterprise systems
- Making enterprise context reliably available at inference time — retrieval, memory, hybrid search, reranking, access controls
- LLMOps that isn't hand-wavy: evals and golden datasets, prompt/agent versioning, tracing, token and cost budgets, CI/CD for agents
- Safety in a regulated enterprise: prompt injection, data exfiltration, PII handling, human-in-the-loop, audit logging
You should have
- 7–10+ years building and scaling production systems, with recent, hands-on GenAI/agentic work in production (not just demos)
- Shipped agents or LLM pipelines at scale
- Solid data chops — vector stores, chunking, hybrid search, knowing when retrieval is the wrong answer
- Cloud experience (we're primarily AWS / Bedrock); comfortable with both containers and serverless
- Track record of technical leadership and mentoring without needing a manager title
Nice to have: LangGraph / Semantic Kernel / PydanticAI, GraphRAG, knowledge graphs, LangFuse/LangSmith, multimodal.
Comp & benefits: $175k is our midpoint for salary + 20% annual target bonus, 401(k) with company match, ESPP, medical/dental/vision, PTO. Remote eligible, prefer AZ timezones +/-1. Not sponsorship eligible.
Why you should want to work here: We build cool stuff
email me (jgardner@republicservices.com) directly with the most interesting agent you've shipped.
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