Staff Software Engineer, AI Product Engineering (AI)

Location: Hybrid, with opportunities in New York City, Minneapolis–St. Paul, or Toronto; candidates should be comfortable working onsite as part of the hybrid schedule.

Base compensation: $158,000–$293,000 USD annually in eligible locations including New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and/or Irvine, McLean, and Washington, DC; $137,100–$254,700 USD annually in other eligible US locations. The role may also include an annual performance bonus.

Company

hirify.global provides trusted content, software, data, and intelligence for professionals and institutions across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media.

What you will do

• Own greenfield and 0→1 AI systems from technical discovery and architecture through implementation, launch, monitoring, and iteration.
• Design and build production backend services using Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, scalable APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and distributed services.
• Build AI-native applications using large language models, agents, orchestration, retrieval, tool/function calling, and real-time AI workflows, integrating providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
• Drive architectural decisions covering reliability, scalability, latency, observability, security, testing, failure handling, and maintainability.
• Evaluate AI behavior in production and build quality measurement, experimentation, evaluation, guardrails, and continuous-improvement mechanisms.
• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, and AI/ML stakeholders; provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, review code, and identify risks across systems and teams.

Requirements

• Significant experience building and operating large-scale, production-grade backend systems, including strong recent hands-on Python development.
• Production experience with backend frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django; FastAPI is strongly preferred.
• Experience designing APIs, backend services, data models, asynchronous systems, and distributed architectures.
• Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and production systems on a major cloud platform; AWS is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated personal ownership of greenfield or 0→1 products and systems from architecture through production launch.
• Experience making architecture decisions across multiple systems, teams, or major product capabilities, with strong system-design skills covering scalability, reliability, performance, failure modes, and operational trade-offs.
• Experience across the complete software lifecycle, including architecture, implementation, deployment, observability, debugging, incident response, and production iteration.
• Ability to influence technical direction without formal authority, communicate clearly, collaborate across technical stakeholders, and turn ambiguous requirements into technical direction.

Nice to have

• Hands-on production experience building generative AI or AI-native applications.
• Experience with LLM-powered agents, agent orchestration, tool/function calling, RAG, embeddings, vector search, retrieval systems, or real-time AI interactions.
• Experience integrating commercial or open foundation models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar providers.
• Experience building customer-facing SaaS or product software in a startup, scale-up, or similarly high-ownership environment.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and modern cloud-native engineering.
• Exposure to TypeScript or modern frontend frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work environment with work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible vacation, paid holidays, sick and safe paid time off, parental leave, sabbatical leave, and two company-wide mental health days.
• Health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, retirement savings or 401(k) with company match, flexible spending and health savings accounts, and employee stock purchase access.
• Tuition reimbursement, learning and development programs, fitness reimbursement, Headspace access, employee assistance resources, and commuter benefits.
• Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
• Inclusive culture focused on customer impact, learning quickly, challenging assumptions, and collaboration.