Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Pendo.io is building AI products for its product experience platform to help software teams understand and serve their users. The Staff Software Engineer (AI) will design and build production-grade AI systems such as RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features, while providing technical leadership and partnering with product, design, and engineering stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Own model deployment, monitoring, latency optimization, cost management, and reliability at scale. You will ensure AI systems are observable, performant, and production-ready
• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Pendo is a hybrid culture. In-office 3 days per week unless designated remote.
• Highly competitive, employer-heavy coverage, including $0 premium options
• Strong 401(k) match
• Equity
• Flexible time off

Company

• AI-powered product analytics and adoption platform for builders
• Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
• http://www.pendo.io/
• Founded in 2013
• 501-1000 employees

Qualifications

• 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
• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to engineers, product managers, and executives
• Demonstrated product judgment and the ability to evaluate whether something should be built before determining how to build it
• Experience fine-tuning foundation models and a clear point of view on when fine-tuning outperforms prompting-based approaches
• 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

Required skills

• AI Monitoring, AI Safety and Guardrails, Agent Orchestration, Diffusion Models, Fine-Tuning, Full-Stack Development, LLM-powered Systems, Latency Optimization, Model Deployment, Model Evaluation, Product judgment, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Transformers