Lead Software Engineer, AI Experience

Location: Fully remote within the United States; employees must reside in and perform work within the United States. Occasional travel may be required for meetings, company events, conferences, and summits.

Company

Penn Foster Group provides online learning and career education through platforms including Penn Foster, CareerStep, Ashworth College, and other education brands.

What you will do

• Define technical strategy and architecture for AI-powered learner and content-authoring experiences.
• Design, build, and ship full-stack systems with TypeScript, Vue.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Azure.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agentic workflows, model orchestration, prompt management, and human-in-the-loop experiences.
• Design evaluation frameworks, quality metrics, observability, and feedback loops for LLM-powered features.
• Integrate Anthropic, OpenAI, and other model APIs while addressing reliability, latency, cost, privacy, security, and graceful degradation.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards through architecture, reviews, documentation, and operational practices.

Requirements

• Must reside and work within the United States; international remote work is not supported.
• 10+ years of experience building and operating customer-facing software products.
• Experience as a technical leader, staff engineer, principal engineer, tech lead, or equivalent.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals across browser technologies, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products using LLMs, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, or agentic workflows.
• Ability to lead complex multi-team initiatives, set technical direction, communicate tradeoffs, mentor engineers, and build reliable, secure, observable, cost-effective systems.

Nice to have

• Experience working at a startup or in an organization with a high engineering bar and a bias toward measurable impact.
• Experience using agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote, async-first environment with a lean, high-output team.
• Collaborative, remote, on-camera meeting culture.
• Medical, dental, vision, flexible spending, and generous paid time off.
• 401(k) with company match and sponsored volunteer opportunities.
• Free access to online education programs.

Hiring process

• Video interviews are recorded for internal hiring consistency and process improvement.
• Employment is contingent on applicable pre-employment screening.
• All hires must complete federal employment eligibility verification through Form I-9, potentially including in-person identity verification.