Staff Software Engineer – AI Platform

Description

This is a senior individual contributor role, not a people-management position. You will shape architecture through design reviews, technical mentorship and hands-on coding rather than through direct reports.

The team builds vehicles and customer experiences, from hardware and battery systems to software and safety features. The company's products carry millions of people every day, and the work covers conversational AI and agent platforms for customer-facing products.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and hands-on delivery of complex customer-facing AI modules, from product requirements through production.
• Define component boundaries, APIs, data models, ERDs, sequence flows, deployment designs, test strategies and AI evaluation plans.
• Build reusable services for orchestration, agents, grounding, retrieval, memory, tool integration, conversation state and channel adapters.
• Make key decisions on inference, serving, reliability, security, observability, capacity and operational readiness.
• Create reference implementations and engineering patterns for AI-enabled services on GCP and Azure.
• Drive CI/CD, automated testing, AI evaluation and regression pipelines, release readiness and production operations.
• Work with product, security, privacy, data, infrastructure and application teams to resolve tradeoffs across systems.
• Lead architecture reviews, design documentation, code reviews, incident analysis and production-readiness reviews.
• Find duplicated capabilities, simplify them and standardize reusable platform interfaces.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including owning distributed, cloud-native or customer-facing systems.
• A record of hands-on architecture or staff-level engineering, delivering production systems at scale.
• Expert Python and strong Go and/or Java skills.
• Strong grasp of distributed-system design, service boundaries, API and data contracts, asynchronous processing, eventing, caching, consistency and fault tolerance.
• Production experience with LLM applications, agent orchestration, RAG, embeddings and vector search, tool use, MCP, A2A, and chatbot or workflow systems, including evaluation of quality, safety, grounding and regressions.
• Experience with inference and serving for low latency, high throughput, concurrency, autoscaling, traffic management and cost and performance optimization.
• Experience with GCP and/or Azure, containers and Kubernetes, IAM, secrets, messaging, managed data services, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and automated testing.
• Ability to define and implement architecture artifacts and non-functional requirements for security, privacy, observability, SLOs and SLIs, capacity, business continuity, disaster recovery and operational resilience.
• Strong written and verbal communication, sound technical judgment, and the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Preferred: experience building conversational AI for automotive, mobility, contact center, consumer or other high-scale customer-facing domains.
• Preferred: experience with Vertex AI, Azure AI services, model gateways, vector databases, retrieval and evaluation platforms, and model observability.
• Preferred: experience with privacy-aware personalization, governed memory, grounding, tool access, auditability and deletion workflows.
• Preferred: experience integrating CRM, identity, knowledge, telephony, messaging or other enterprise systems.
• Preferred: experience consolidating duplicated platforms through incremental adoption and leading cross-organization architecture work without direct authority.

Conditions

Base salary is between $189,300 and $333,400. The offer will depend on job-related factors and the geography of the selected candidate, and the range is a good faith estimate under applicable state law.

Pay includes an incentive program, with payouts based on company performance, job level and individual performance.

The role is hybrid. You are expected to work on site at a specific location at least 3 days a week, or at a frequency set by your manager.

Relocation benefits are available to candidates who qualify under company policy.

The company does not provide immigration sponsorship for this role. Do not apply if you now need, or will in the future need, company immigration sponsorship, including employer-of-record filings or any work authorization that requires a written submission or other support from the company, such as H-1B, OPT, STEM OPT, CPT, TN or J-1.

Candidates may be required to complete a role-related assessment and/or a pre-employment screening before starting.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not tolerate unlawful discrimination.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing programs, including medical, dental, vision, a Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation and holidays.
• Tuition assistance, an employee assistance program and vehicle discounts.