Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer AI)

Location: Hybrid role based in Eagan, Minnesota, United States, with other listed locations in Frisco, Texas and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Base compensation: $118,400–$219,800 USD annually, varying by eligible US location. The role may also be eligible for an annual bonus.

Company

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

What you will do

• Build and architect AI-agentic systems and production-ready legal software for CoCounsel Legal, including litigation drafting products.
• Design backend services with Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL for real-time agentic interactions, workflows, LLM orchestration, and content pipelines.
• Define service boundaries, system interfaces, scalable design patterns, and technical strategy for the AI platform.
• Lead experimentation, testing, rollout practices, monitoring, observability, security, compliance, and operational excellence for AI systems.
• Integrate modern LLM providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic with routing, error handling, guardrails, telemetry, and reliability controls; strengthen CI/CD and DevOps automation.
• Provide technical leadership to front-end and back-end engineers, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Labs, product managers, designers, and other engineering leaders.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in technical leadership roles and 3+ years building scalable cloud applications, APIs, and AI-enabled products.
• Experience shipping production-grade AI systems to enterprise customers, including deployment, monitoring, evaluation, scaling, and ongoing operational ownership.
• Strong proficiency in Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and AWS or Azure cloud services.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, architecture, and data modelling.
• Experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines for production web applications, including automated testing and safe release practices; relevant tools include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CodePipeline.
• Strong cross-functional communication, product sense, ability to work from ambiguous requirements, strategic thinking, problem-solving, and presentation skills.
• Strong leadership and mentoring experience with the ability to influence senior stakeholders.

Nice to have

• BA or BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Knowledge of vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and information retrieval.
• Hands-on experience with AG-UI or comparable agent-UI protocols and SDKs, plus strong proficiency in SSE events.
• Knowledge of backend streaming patterns using Node or Python/FastAPI sufficient to debug end to end.
• Experience with Datadog, CloudWatch Log Insights, and Braintrust.
• Experience building products for legal, compliance, or other regulated professional domains.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles, with work-from-anywhere flexibility 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, and life insurance; 401(k) with company match; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
• Tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, stock purchase plan, fitness reimbursement, commuter benefits, adoption and surrogacy assistance, and wellbeing resources.
• Career development through continuous learning, skills-first programs, and opportunities for social impact, volunteering, pro-bono consulting, and ESG initiatives.