engineering
Posted 2 weeks agoStaff Software Engineer (AI)
at pendo
New York, United StatesHybrid
Responsibilities
- Model strategy: Make principled decisions about when to prompt, when to fine-tune, and when to use a different technical approach entirely.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
- Applied AI systems: Design and build AI-native systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered product features.
- 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.
- 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.
- We want someone who sees AI as a multiplier, not a shortcut. Must-haves Deep hands-on
- 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.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to engineers, product managers, and executives.
- Familiarity with AI safety considerations, guardrail frameworks, and responsible deployment practices. •
- Experience building agentic or multi-step reasoning systems using tools such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom orchestration frameworks.
- Background in a SaaS or product analytics environment where user behavior data informs AI product design. Prior
- experience contributing to or launching a net-new team or product area. About Pendo
- experience with software. Come join one of the fastest-growing startups, supported by best-in-class institutions like Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Meritech.
- Pendo Core Values: Bias to Act, Hone Your Craft, The Team is Pendo, and Maniacal Focus.
Benefits
- Compensation: The expected salary range for this role to be performed in New York, NY is $245,000 - $275,000.
- Benefits: Highly competitive, employer-heavy coverage, including $0 premium options, strong 401(k) match, equity, and flexible time off.
Contact
- If you think you may require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please send a request to: accommodation@pendo.io.
Additional details
- The team operates with high autonomy, moves quickly, and builds products without clear precedents.
- You will also partner closely with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to frame the right problems and communicate technical decisions clearly.
- You will take ideas from prototype through production and ensure they can support real users.
- 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.
- 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.