DIRECT MANAGER/DIRECT REPORTS:

• This position typically reports to Software Engineer Manager or Sr. Manager
• This position typically has 0 Direct Reports

TRAVEL REQUIREMENTS:

• No travel required.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:

• Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Must be eighteen years of age or older.
• Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• 5-8 years of relevant work experience
• LLM-Focused Backend Developer
• Extensive experience with Python, and Scalable API development using FastAPI, Tornado
• Machine Learning & Generative AI: Experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, RAG Architecture, and Prompt Engineering is essential
• Familiarity with LangSmith, LangGraph, or other agentic framework technologies
• Vector Stores: Experience with technologies like Pinecone, Google Vector Store, Vespa, or AstraDB
• NoSQL: Proficiency with BigTable, Cassandra, or HBase
• Big Data Platforms: Experience with BigQuery, Apache Spark, and Apache Beam
• Orchestration Tools: Familiarity with Google Cloud Composer or Apache Airflow
• Relevancy experience: Search retrieval and ranking experience (Search engine like Elastic or Solr or Lucene based)
• ML Ops experience: ML for retrieval and ranking like model training and deployment pipeline experience using Python and GCP tools like Vertex AI, Dataflow/Data proc jobs
• Feature engineering for batch and runtime model inferences
• General understanding of retrieval retrieval systems, concepts, challenges

MINIMUM EDUCATION:

• The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor’s degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.

PREFERRED EDUCATION:

• No additional education

PREFERRED YEARS OF WORK EXPERIENCE:

• No additional years of experience

MINIMUM LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE:

• None

PREFERRED LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE:

• None

POSITION PURPOSE:

The Staff Software Engineer is responsible for leading a team of engineers building and designing a product that our customers and associates love. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be part of a dynamic team with engineers of all experience levels who help each other build and grow technical and leadership skills while creating, deploying, and supporting production applications. In addition, Staff Software Engineers will assist in product and tool selection, configuration, security, resilience, performance tuning and production monitoring.
Staff Software Engineers contribute to foundational code elements that can be reused as well as architectural diagrams and other product-related documentation. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a core player on the product team and are expected to build and grow the skillsets of the more junior Engineers.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• 50% Delivery and Execution - Develops, tests, deploys, and maintains software, with a clear understanding of the value the software is to provide; Takes a broad view when approaching issues; using a global lens; Consistently achieves results, even under tough circumstances; Develops test suites (functional, destructive, etc) to enable success, rapid deployment of code to production; Takes on new opportunities and tough challenges with a sense of urgency, high energy and enthusiasm; Consistently achieves results, even under tough circumstances
• 10% Learns and Grows - Actively seeks ways to grow and be challenged using both formal and informal development channels; Learns through successful and failed experiment when tackling new problems
• 20% Plans and Aligns - Creates new and better ways for the organization to be successful; Delivers multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences; Works the Product Team to ensure user stories are developer ready, easy to understand and testable; Collaborates with other team members in agile processes; Relates openly and comfortably with diverse groups of people; Adapts approach and demeanor in real time to match the shifting demands of different situations
• 20% Supports and Enables - Fields questions from product and engineering teams; Helps grow junior engineers by providing guidance on modern software development frameworks, and leading technical discussions; Notes gaps on the team and provides suggestions for changes to make the team more productive