Staff Software Engineer (AI)

The Team + The Role Our Emerging Team is focused on building AI Products for our product experience (PX) platform. We build from the ground up to explore, prototype, and ship AI-native experiences that change how software teams understand and serve their users. This is not an AI layer added to existing product; it is a deliberate bet on what product intelligence looks like next. The team operates with high autonomy, moves quickly, and builds products without clear precedents. As a Staff Software Engineer (AI), you will sit at the intersection of deep technical capability and strong product judgment. You will design and build production-grade AI systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features, while making clear tradeoffs across prompting, fine-tuning, architecture, evaluation, and deployment. You will also partner closely with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to frame the right problems and communicate technical decisions clearly. This role is based in our New York office. What this looks like day-to-day Applied AI systems: Design and build AI-native systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered product features. You will take ideas from prototype through production and ensure they can support real users. Model strategy: Make principled decisions about when to prompt, when to fine-tune, and when to use a different technical approach entirely. You will explain those tradeoffs clearly to engineers and non-engineers. Evaluation and guardrails: Instrument and evaluate model outputs rigorously by defining evaluation frameworks and identifying hallucinations early. You will implement guardrails that hold up under real-world usage and load. Productionize AI ownership: Own model deployment, monitoring, latency optimization, cost management, and reliability at scale. You will ensure AI systems are observable, performant, and production-ready. Full-stack delivery: Contribute across the stack when needed to get complete AI products in front of users. This team ships products, not just models, and you will help close the gap between technical capability and user experience. Product partnership: Partner closely with product and design to frame problems well before implementation begins. You will push back when the framing is wrong and help the team stay focused on what is worth building. Technical leadership: Stay current on the research and tooling landscape, including transformers, diffusion architectures, orchestration frameworks, and emerging agent patterns. You will bring relevant advances back to the team and help raise the technical bar. Who You Are 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. Must-haves 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