Staff Engineer - AI Platform

We're looking for a Staff Engineer (AI) to architect and build the agentic systems and AI foundations within our Platform Services team - the team responsible for the shared infrastructure, internal tooling, and core services that other product teams build on.

This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role: you will set technical direction, write and review code, and own the design of systems that let HighLevel engineering teams build, ship, and operate AI-driven capabilities reliably at enterprise scale.

• Architecture & Scale: Own and evolve the architecture of agentic systems and AI platform services, ensuring they are reliable, extensible, and performant under enterprise-scale load.
• AI-First Culture: Set and drive an AI-first culture within the Platform Services team - making AI tools and agentic workflows the default way the team builds and operates.
• Reliability & Safety: Build agents that fail safely - with guardrails, scoped permissions, sandboxing, defenses against prompt injection, audit trails, graceful degradation, and clear incident management practices.
• Evaluation & Data-Driven Decisions: Establish rigorous evaluation practices - offline evals, regression suites, and production monitoring - so agent behavior is measurable and comparable across model and prompt changes. Use that data to prioritize, evaluate trade-offs, and report on agent quality, platform health, and cost.
• Cost & Efficiency: Drive continuous optimization of inference, token, and infrastructure cost without compromising quality or reliability - with measurable, sustained impact.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Set technical standards, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and build a culture of ownership and craftsmanship in AI engineering across the org.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Communication: Partner closely with product engineering teams, SRE/infra, security, and leadership to align AI platform capabilities with organizational needs, and communicate technical direction, risks, and progress clearly across the org.

• 12+ years of overall software engineering experience, including significant time as a senior or staff-level individual contributor.
• At least the last 1+ year spent architecting agentic systems in production - designing multi-step, tool-using agents, orchestration, memory and context management, and guardrails, not just integrating LLM APIs. A champion of AI agent orchestration at scale, running many agents and workflows reliably across teams.
• AI-first mindset (must have) - actively using AI tools in your own engineering workflow, with the ability to set and drive an AI-first culture within the Platform Services team.
• Expert-level proficiency in either Go, Python or Nodejs.
• Strong hands-on orientation - comfortable writing and reviewing code, debugging production issues, and going deep on architecture. Candidates in a purely managerial (non-hands-on) role for the last 1+ year will not be considered a fit.
• Strong working knowledge of LLM application fundamentals - tool/function calling, MCP, retrieval and context engineering, prompt and model management, and evaluation methodologies for non-deterministic systems.
• Strong observability fundamentals, with deep experience in AI observability - tracing agent runs and monitoring quality, latency, cost, and safety in production - using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture - consistency, availability, fault tolerance, scaling patterns, and trade-offs at scale.
• Cost-aware by design - a track record of measurable cost optimization in an enterprise cloud environment, including managing LLM inference and token spend through model routing, caching, and budgets.
• Practical experience with GCP and/or AWS service management - provisioning, scaling, IAM, networking, and cost governance.
• Prior experience working as an individual contributor on platform teams for at least 3+ years, at enterprise scale.
• Proven ability to lead technically without authority - writing design docs, driving cross-team alignment, and mentoring engineers.
• A data-driven approach to decision-making, prioritization, and performance reporting.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Good to have: open-source contributions or published work on agentic systems.