Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agentic AI

Description

The team is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer at IC5 level to set technical direction for AI-native and cloud-native systems. You will be a strategic technical leader who pushes innovation, shapes how engineering works, and steers the platform. The work covers the most complex and high-impact problems, including new AI/ML challenges, scaled best practices, and aligning the technical strategy with business goals. The role pairs deep hands-on skill with broad systems thinking, organizational influence, and developing senior engineers. IC5 engineers act as trusted advisors to leadership and to the wider organization.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and strategy for AI-native and cloud-native systems, including multi-year roadmaps and architectural patterns.
• Lead the building of core platforms and infrastructure for AI-native development at scale, covering evaluation, monitoring, security, and deployment.
• Own the technical roadmap for critical AI initiatives, judging feasibility and setting realistic timelines.
• Design large, complex systems that span several teams, cloud infrastructure, and advanced AI/ML components.
• Lead the design of evaluation frameworks, observability, and production monitoring for AI features at scale.
• Build security architecture and responsible AI guardrails that work across the whole platform.
• Design high-performance data platforms, embedding systems, and retrieval pipelines for organization-wide use.
• Weigh performance, cost, scalability, reliability, developer experience, and business value when making architecture decisions.
• Set technical standards, architectural principles, and engineering excellence practices across the organization.
• Drive adoption of emerging AI/ML tools and frameworks, and assess new services for organizational fit.
• Champion foundational work such as refactoring, testing infrastructure, monitoring, and security that benefits the whole organization.
• Shape platform decisions on cost, latency, reliability, and model quality, balancing them against business goals.
• Track AI/ML research and industry trends, turning useful findings into practical business applications.
• Mentor senior engineers (IC3/IC4) and engineering leaders, and support their move into leadership and architecture roles.
• Lead hiring at senior levels, including technical interviews and mentoring interviewing skills across engineering.
• Run architecture and design reviews, giving critical feedback that improves technical decisions.
• Lead root cause analysis and architectural review for critical incidents, and drive changes that prevent repeats.
• Explain technical vision and strategy to executives, product leaders, and engineers, and help shape organizational priorities.
• Work with product, design, and domain specialists to define ambitious roadmaps that match business strategy.
• Represent engineering in high-stakes customer and partner discussions.
• Lead or contribute to technical due diligence for acquisitions, partnerships, and strategic technology evaluations.
• Explain AI/ML concepts, trade-offs, and limitations to audiences from engineers to executives.
• Define platform architecture and integration patterns for AI-native the company applications, and set the company development standards.
• Decide when to use the company platform capabilities versus custom development, and drive adoption of platform features and upgrades.
• Work with the company product teams and technical account managers on advanced integrations and customizations.
• Shape the support approach, response and resolution standards, and lead customer-critical incident response and escalation.
• Engage strategic customers on technical topics, roadmap alignment, and complex integrations, and turn their feedback into product direction.

Requirements

• 14+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 8+ years with a Master's degree, or 5+ years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native and AI-native systems, or equivalent senior-level roles.
• Hands-on experience with LLM and AI systems at scale, including prompt engineering, agent design, retrieval systems, and production AI/ML services.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling systems that use third-party AI/ML services and platform APIs across multiple cloud providers.
• 3+ years designing and building applications on platform-as-a-service or SaaS platforms.
• Expert-level Python, Java, and JavaScript/GlideScript, along with deep the company scripting, API, and platform architecture knowledge.
• Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and large-scale systems.
• A proven record designing high-performance, mission-critical data pipelines, embedding systems, and vector databases.
• Expert knowledge of LLM orchestration frameworks, RAG architectures, retrieval optimization, and vector database technologies.
• Deep expertise in cloud computing on AWS, GCP, or Azure, managed AI services, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong background in Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Expertise building evaluation frameworks, metrics systems, and production monitoring for AI/ML systems.
• Experience with secure coding, responsible AI, and compliance requirements, with clear views on how they should be applied.
• Experience leading customer-critical initiatives or providing technical leadership on strategic accounts.
• Preferred: deep expertise with the company platform at scale.

Conditions

Base pay for this location is $190,900 to $334,100, plus equity when applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.

Sales positions generally offer an On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive structure.

The base pay shown is a guideline. Total compensation depends on qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location, and pay is based on the geographic location of the role and may change.

Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are assigned based on the nature of the work and the assigned work location.

To confirm eligibility for a work persona, the company may check the distance between your primary residence and the nearest office using a third-party service.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan.
• Family leave programs.