Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada, +2 more countries.

📋 Description

• Develop and enhance essential AI platform functionalities for applications powered by GenAI.

• Create, implement, and deploy scalable tools and infrastructure for applied scientists.

• Assist in the training and serving systems for ML models, manage feature and data workflows, CI/CD, orchestration, deployment, and evaluation tools.

• Engage actively across backend services, execution infrastructure, AI models, and related tools.

• Assess next-generation frameworks and tools for AI infrastructure.

• Lead projects to fruition with an emphasis on business impact and measurable results.

• Establish technical direction for AI/ML and AI evaluation platforms.

• Collaborate with applied scientists, product engineering teams, senior engineers, and engineering leadership.

• Outline multi-quarter roadmaps and make decisions regarding build, buy, or adopt strategies.

• Ensure the platform aligns with Thumbtack's AI objectives.

• Tackle complex technical challenges and keep abreast of advancements in AI infrastructure.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of professional experience in software engineering.

• Proven track record of technical leadership at a staff level or an equivalent scope.

• Experience in setting the course for systems that span multiple teams and guiding them through to production.

• At least 3 years of experience in constructing AI/ML infrastructure in a production environment.

• Practical experience with LLM-powered systems in a production setting.

• Familiarity with LLM gateways or proxies, prompt and model lifecycle management, RAG or agentic architectures, and cost optimization for LLM workloads.

• Experience in building or operating AI evaluation systems.

• Knowledge of offline evaluation pipelines, LLM-as-judge methodologies, calibration against human judgment, regression testing, or A/B measurement of AI features.

• Extensive experience in designing, building, and maintaining reliable distributed systems.

• Ownership of production services at a significant scale.

• On-call responsibilities and leadership during incidents.

• Demonstrated proficiency in utilizing AI coding tools and validating, critiquing, and refining AI-generated outputs.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equal opportunity workplace.

• Reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.