Senior / Staff Software Engineer — Product (Backend-Focused) (AI)

Location: Hybrid, with at least three days per week in the San Francisco, CA or New York City office.

Salary: $208,000–$315,000 USD.

Company

Snorkel AI is an AI data lab developing datasets, benchmarks, evaluations, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems.

What you will do

• Build, ship, and improve backend product capabilities from user-problem discovery through design, implementation, launch, and production support.
• Partner with Product Managers, designers, and engineers to shape features and turn user needs into intuitive, reliable product experiences.
• Build and evolve APIs, services, data models, and workflow capabilities.
• Develop products for data cataloging and search, agent-performance benchmarking, and post-production and delivery workflow automation.
• Investigate and resolve issues across services and data flows, including performance and production problems.
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, technical quality, scalability, and maintainability.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, at Senior or Staff level.
• Strong backend or backend-oriented full-stack experience building and improving a product.
• Experience contributing to polished, intuitive products that simplify complex tasks for users.
• Experience partnering with Product Managers and cross-functional teammates to understand user needs and shape product features.
• Experience building and maintaining backend services and APIs, and working with data stores and queries.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to write reliable, maintainable code.
• Ability to investigate technical problems, debug effectively, and make sound decisions within an area of ownership.
• Clear communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions to engineering and cross-functional partners.
• Ability to work independently while collaborating closely with a team. Experience with Python is not required; Java, Go, Rust, C++, or another language is welcome with demonstrated strong engineering ability.

Nice to have

• Experience with data-heavy products for organizing, cataloging, searching, or querying complex datasets.
• Experience with agent workflows, agent evaluations, benchmarking, or analyzing agent-activity traces.
• Experience building workflow automation; familiarity with DAGs is helpful but not required.
• Experience in developer tools or products with sophisticated user workflows.
• Experience taking a product feature from an initial user problem through launch and continued improvement.

Culture & Benefits

• Meaningful ownership of a product used by technical and enterprise teams solving high-stakes problems.
• Opportunity to simplify complex workflows through product interfaces and underlying systems.
• Environment focused on engineering craft, growth, learning, and shared success.
• Opportunities to shape priorities, influence strategic decisions, deepen technical expertise, and explore leadership or cross-functional learning.
• Equal employment opportunities and commitment to a diverse team.