Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Required

• Beyond the qualifications, we hire through a specific lens. These aren t buzzwords; they re the things we ll actually look for in how you talk about your work.
• You re a builder, not a maintainer.
• You re most energized when there isn t a clear path yet, and you get to define it. You don t wait for direction; you identify gaps, shape solutions, and drive them forward. At Pendo, great Staff AI Software Engineers don t just follow instructions; they operate as strategic advisors, influencing decisions, guiding stakeholders, and elevating how we work.
• You re AI-curious - genuinely.
• You re not using AI tools occasionally. You re rewiring how you work around them. You re faster, sharper, and more prolific because of it, and you bring that energy to everything — how you approach your work, how you prep, how you communicate, how you think. We want someone who sees AI as a multiplier, not a shortcut.
• Deep hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-powered systems, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for AI systems across teams, establish architectural patterns, make foundational model strategy decisions, and raise the bar for AI engineering quality.
• Experience owning outcomes across team boundaries, including identifying capability gaps, driving alignment across engineering and product, and influencing how a broader organization approaches AI.
• Strong command of model evaluation, including designing evaluation suites, reasoning about overfitting and bias-variance tradeoffs, and systematically detecting and mitigating hallucinations.
• Solid understanding of modern model architectures, including transformers and diffusion models, with the ability to make informed decisions about when and how to apply them.
• Production Productionize AI experience, including model deployment, monitoring pipelines, and latency, cost, and reliability optimization in live environments.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals and comfort working across backend and frontend systems to ship complete, user-facing AI products.