Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Denver, CO; New York, NY; or San Francisco, CA, United States. Employees based in these locations are expected to work from the office approximately 2–3 days per week. A secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required when working outside a hirify.global office.

Company

hirify.global provides payroll, health insurance, 401(k), and HR services to more than 500,000 small businesses.

What you will do

• Design and build the Otto AI agent platform, including the runtime, agent graph, tool and action layer, Rails/GraphQL backend, and advocate-facing product experience.
• Expand secure agent capabilities with autonomous tool-using actions, human approval workflows, and auditable identity and permissions models.
• Build evaluation and observability systems using LLM-based judges, deterministic scorers, offline gates, and production monitoring.
• Work with LLM prompting, tool and function design, retrieval, and feedback loops based on advocate interactions.
• Partner with Product, Data, Design, and Customer Experience teams to deliver capabilities that address customer and advocate problems.
• Mentor engineers and establish responsible practices for building agentic systems at scale.

Requirements

• Typically 8+ years of software engineering experience with end-to-end ownership of systems.
• Production experience building and shipping LLM-powered or agentic systems, including tool-calling agents, retrieval, or evaluation systems.
• Strong full-stack range across backend services, LLM runtimes, and customer-facing products.
• Experience owning multi-quarter projects with measurable user impact at scale.
• Sound judgment regarding safety and blast radius when software takes actions on real customer accounts.
• Ability to mentor engineers and raise engineering standards.

Nice to have

• Experience with agent frameworks, LLM evaluations, LLM-as-judge systems, retrieval, or MCP-style tool architectures.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, or React, or the ability to ramp up quickly.
• Familiarity with GraphQL and federated backends.
• Experience in collaborative, test-driven, high-autonomy environments with clear stakeholder communication.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and RSU equity.
• AI tools are integrated into how work gets done, with an expectation that employees develop relevant AI fluency.
• Work is organized around customer outcomes and a short path from idea to production.
• hirify.global supports employees from diverse backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations during the hiring process.
• Hybrid employees must maintain a secure and reliable internet connection when working outside the office.