Senior Staff Applications Development Engineer

Description

Title: Senior Staff Applications Development Engineer.

The team builds industry-specific software for sectors with their own workflows, data models and regulations, such as telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and high-tech. Solutions are built for each sector rather than as one generic product.

The applications are AI-native, meaning their core behavior comes from models that interpret intent, reason over context, call tools and act for the user, while staying within each industry's business processes, data structures and changing regulatory rules.

This is a Senior Staff Software Engineer role. You will design, build, ship and run these applications. Much of the key logic is written in natural language, including instructions, prompts, tool descriptions and guardrails, as well as code. You will cover the full development lifecycle and will often work embedded with customers as a forward deployed engineer, using their data, integrations and channels. Besides hands-on work, you will lead engineering standards, mentor engineers and shape architecture and platform direction across several teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and deliver scalable AI-native enterprise applications for industry workflows, data models and compliance needs, including the integrations and channels needed to run them in production.
• Build agent behavior: interpret intent, reason across steps, invoke tools and functions, and act for the user through chat, and voice where needed. Conversations must keep context and pass cleanly between automated and human agents.
• Break business processes into steps and decision points an agent can run. Decide where the agent acts alone and where a person must check, and define how exceptions, retries and handoffs to people work.
• Write and maintain agent instructions, including system instructions, role definitions, tool descriptions, guardrails and escalation rules, as versioned engineering artifacts with review and regression tests.
• Improve prompts against measured results rather than demo quality. Cover task breakdown, reference examples, structured outputs, grounding and citations, graceful failure, and token and latency cost.
• Build automated evaluation for non-deterministic behavior: reference datasets, multi-turn conversation suites, model-based scoring checked against human review, CI gates, drift detection, and tests for adversarial input, jailbreaks, grounding and tool selection.
• Design software that lets customers configure and extend the platform without losing performance, reliability or maintainability. Write clean, reusable, well-tested code, with code reviews, unit tests and test automation.
• Write precise, testable specifications for AI coding agents, with explicit scope, constraints and acceptance criteria. Split work into agent-sized tasks and review the output for correctness and maintainability. You are responsible for the result however it was produced.
• Work as a forward deployed engineer when needed: build against customer data, integrations and channels, tune instructions and evaluation sets in their environment, and bring back findings that improve the product.
• Own quality, safety and reliability in production. Monitor conversation quality, containment, hallucination and unsafe actions. Guard against prompt injection and data leakage, and feed production failures back into specs and evaluation sets. Troubleshoot and tune performance, scale and reliability in distributed systems.
• Act as a technical leader: mentor engineers, share knowledge, set engineering practice and lead complex initiatives across teams, influencing architecture and platform direction.
• Work with product managers, designers and stakeholders to turn business and regulatory requirements into scalable technical designs, agree on tradeoffs, and explain capabilities, limits and risks to non-engineers.

Requirements

• Experience using AI in work processes, decisions or problem solving. This can include AI tools, workflow automation, analysis of AI-driven results, or assessing AI's effect on the function or industry.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience in SaaS, building and running products at production scale.
• A record of shipping and operating production software, including hands-on delivery of AI-native features that real users rely on.
• Direct hands-on experience writing agent instructions and prompts, designing AI-driven autonomous workflows, and building evaluation and testing for non-deterministic behavior.
• Advanced skill in data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, system design, APIs and performance optimization.
• Solid understanding of modern application architecture across cloud, distributed systems, and service-oriented or platform technologies, plus data modeling and storage. Depth matters more than any particular language or framework.
• Application-layer AI development: agent orchestration, tool and function calling, context assembly, grounding on enterprise data, and handling latency, cost and failure.
• Prompt engineering and evaluation of non-deterministic systems: intent-driven prompt design and measurable methods for response quality, agent behavior, tool selection accuracy and regression risk, improved using evaluation results.
• Precise problem definition, clear enough for another engineer or an AI agent to implement correctly, and sound judgment on whether to solve a problem in code, in instructions, or by delegating to an agent.
• Working knowledge of AI application security and data handling: prompt injection, leakage of sensitive data and secrets, excessive tool access, and unsafe autonomous actions. Able to turn these into guardrails, least-privilege controls and monitoring.
• Willingness to work directly with customers as a forward deployed engineer. Knowing when a quick local fix is right and when to build the lasting solution, and able to explain capabilities, limits and risks to non-engineers.
• Experience leading technically complex projects across several teams as a technical owner or engineering lead, with strong communication, collaboration and mentoring skills.
• Experience applying AI to engineering workflows, decisions, automation or the software development process itself.
• Preferred: the company platform experience, including building configurable, extensible applications on it.
• Preferred: deep knowledge of high-tech, and familiarity with regulated industries such as telecommunications, healthcare, financial services or manufacturing, enough to challenge requirements, not just build them.
• Preferred: experience delivering chat, voice or combined conversational experiences, including turn and context management, disambiguation and confirmation patterns, and handoff from automation to humans.
• Preferred: prior forward deployed, solution engineering or professional services work delivering software inside a customer's environment.
• Preferred: familiarity with modern UI frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue, and with evaluation, tracing, and prompt or instruction management tools for LLM applications.
• Preferred: a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Preferred: 10+ years of experience with Java or a similar object-oriented language.
• Preferred: enthusiasm for JavaScript and the web as a platform, reuse and componentization.
• Preferred: advanced knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance and scale.
• Preferred: experience with at least one of Angular, React or Vue.
• Preferred: advanced experience with relational databases, including development, troubleshooting and performance tuning.
• Preferred: experience across several technology stacks, such as cloud development, platforms, web development, frameworks or service-oriented architecture.
• Preferred: ability to manage several projects with significant technical risk across teams and processes, and to act as a functional lead or technical owner.
• Preferred: FD21.

Conditions

Base pay for this role in this location is $190,900 to $334,100, plus equity where applicable, variable or incentive pay, and benefits. Pay is a guideline; the final total depends on qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location. Pay depends on the geographic location of the role and may change.

Work persona (flexible, remote or required in office) is assigned by the nature of the work and the work location. The company may check the distance from your home to the nearest office with a third-party service to confirm eligibility.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• ESPP.
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time-away plan and family leave programs.