Principal/Staff Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal/Staff Software Engineer (AI): Leading the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation for a large-scale AI chat agent platform designed to support over 20 million global users, with an accent on scale, reliability, and performance. Focus on foundational architectural decisions, partnering with AI/ML, Infra, and Security teams to build production-ready AI experiences, and mentoring senior engineers.

Location: Hybrid in Lausanne, Switzerland. A relocation package is offered for candidates moving from another country.

Company

hirify.global is a leader in digital employee experience management software, providing IT leaders with insights to proactively optimize digital experiences for over 18 million employees globally.

What you will do

• Define and drive technical vision and architectural strategy for the AI chat backend platform.
• Lead design of highly scalable, low-latency, distributed systems for 20M+ global users.
• Partner with product, infra, and AI/ML teams to align engineering strategy with business objectives.
• Architect and deliver fault-tolerant APIs and services for large-scale real-time workloads.
• Champion observability, performance, and resiliency across the stack.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, raising the technical bar across teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with 3+ years in Staff or Principal-level roles.
• Proven success designing and scaling backend systems for tens of millions of users or high-throughput real-time systems.
• Expertise in Java (17+), Python, or Node.js, with a strong background in distributed systems, concurrency, and high availability.
• Hands-on expertise in cloud-native architectures (AWS or equivalent), Kubernetes/ECS, and containerized deployments.
• Strong experience building and operating mission-critical services with SLAs in production.
• Deep understanding of API design, streaming data, and event-driven systems.

Nice to have

• Deep knowledge of Java frameworks (Spring Boot, Micronaut).
• Advanced expertise in streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, Spark).
• Experience productionizing LLM-powered systems (RAG, fine-tuning, observability, evaluation frameworks).
• Prior ownership of multi-region or global-scale deployments.
• Familiarity with GitOps, Terraform, CI/CD, and platform engineering practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent contract and competitive compensation package.
• Hybrid work model balancing office and remote work from a beautiful office in Lausanne, Switzerland.
• Flexible hours and unlimited vacation (plus 25 days of holidays and 3 company-paid volunteer days).
• Free access to a fitness centre and reimbursement of public transport costs.
• Reimbursement up to 50% of the cost of French classes.
• Regular company and team events.