Staff Software Engineer

Description

Staff Software Engineer role in HRSD, the HR domain of the product. The company builds agentic and conversational experiences that understand what employees, managers, and HR agents want, reason over profile, case, catalog, policy, and knowledge data, and take actions for the user.

This is not an ML research role and you will not train foundation models. It also differs from standard full-stack staff work because the logic here is partly written in natural language and behavior is probabilistic, so correctness is checked through large-scale evaluation rather than fixed assertions.

Responsibilities

• Guide the technical direction for model-driven features across the HR domain. Your main output is the architecture, standards, and evaluation tooling that let several teams ship these experiences safely.
• Define the AI architecture: how agents are split up and combined, where reasoning runs, how context is built and limited, how tools are exposed, and how autonomy is handed to agents. Own multi-release decisions such as model selection and migration, orchestration approach, build versus adopt, and the cost, latency, and quality trade-offs.
• Set the domain policy for which HR actions an agent may take, which need a human decision point, and which no agent should attempt. Any change to pay, employment status, restricted records, or employee relations must have a human in the loop, enforced by the system design.
• Treat the shared instruction and tool description layer as a versioned contract that customers can configure, extend, and override on their own instances. Provide upgrade-safe extension points, deprecation paths, and compatibility guarantees.
• Build and own evaluation infrastructure: golden datasets, multi-turn test suites, judge calibration, CI gates, and drift detection, so teams can change behavior with confidence. Cover HR-specific failure types such as access-boundary violations, cross-scope data leaks, and jurisdiction or policy variant errors.
• Monitor production quality and safety, including containment, hallucination rate, tool-selection errors, unsafe actions, and injection attempts through user content that reaches agent context. Since HR conversations are restricted, design diagnostics that work without revealing what was said.
• Turn unclear problems into testable specifications. Set and enforce standards for agent-assisted delivery in the domain, covering specifications, code review expectations, and verification harnesses.
• Write code hands-on where it matters most: difficult integrations, risky migrations, prototypes that settle architecture debates, and incidents that others cannot resolve.
• Work with product, engineering, and design to build scalable AI solutions and turn business needs into solid technical designs.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including technical direction that other teams have adopted.
• Hands-on experience writing agent instructions and prompts, designing autonomous workflows, and building the evaluations that verify them.
• Production work with LLM APIs, retrieval-grounded features, agent orchestration, tool and function calling, and structured output enforcement. Includes at least one model or orchestration migration carried through to production.
• Experience handling entitlement-aware data: enforcing per-user access in retrieval and tool layers, separating scope between roles, and handling restricted records under audit.
• Experience building evaluation tooling that other engineers use: dataset curation, judge calibration, CI gating, and drift detection.
• Strong skills in system design, APIs, data modeling, and testing across front end, server, and relational data, with a strong focus on quality.
• Effective and accountable use of AI coding assistants and agents.
• On-call and incident command experience on customer-facing systems, including owning the systemic fixes that followed.
• Experience with Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and React, and a proven ability to pick up new tools and frameworks quickly.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Preferred: Depth in HR domains such as case management, employee lifecycle and journey, or payroll, benefits, leave, and absence, enough to set requirements.
• Preferred: Integration with core HR, payroll, or benefits systems of record, including reconciliation and eventual consistency patterns.
• Preferred: Involvement in a forward deployment model, helping champion customer adoption.
• Requisition code: FD21

Conditions

Work persona (flexible, remote, or required in office) is assigned based on the nature of the work and the assigned work location. The company may use a third-party service to confirm the distance between your home and the nearest office.

Compensation depends on the geographic location of the role and may change based on work location.

Benefits

• Base pay for positions in this location is $149,800 to $262,200. Total pay also includes equity where applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.
• Health plans including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) plan with company match, an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP), matching donations, flexible time away, and family leave programs.
• Base pay is a guideline. Individual total compensation varies with qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.
• Sales roles generally include a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive structure. This does not apply to this role.