Sr. Software Engineer (AI)

Pendo builds AI products for its product experience platform. The Senior Software Engineer (AI) designs and ships applied AI systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features, from prototype through production, while partnering across engineering, product, and design.

Big Data

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Enterprise Software
• SaaS
• Analytics
• Product Design
• Product Management
• Insider Connection @Pendo.io
• 2 email credits available today
• Beyond your network
• David Kindel & 4 connections
• From your previous company

Responsibilities

• Applied AI systems: Design and build AI systems including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features. You will take work from prototype through production and ensure it can hold up in real customer environments
• Technical decision-making: Make principled decisions on when to prompt, when to fine-tune, and when to use a different tool entirely. You will explain these tradeoffs clearly so the team can move quickly without sacrificing quality
• Model evaluation: Instrument and evaluate model outputs rigorously by defining evaluation frameworks and catching hallucinations early. You will implement guardrails that can withstand real-world load and production use
• Productionize AI ownership: Own model deployment, monitoring, latency optimization, cost management, and reliability at scale. You will help ensure AI systems are observable, efficient, and dependable in production
• Full-stack product shipping: Contribute across the stack when needed because this team ships products, not just models. You will work across backend and frontend to get AI-powered experiences in front of users
• Product partnership: Partner closely with product and design to frame problems well before writing code. You will push back when the framing is wrong and help the team focus on what should be built, not just what can be built
• Research and tooling awareness: 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 apply them thoughtfully

Preferred

• Experience fine-tuning foundation models and a clear point of view on when fine-tuning outperforms prompting 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 design
• Prior experience contributing to or launching a net-new team or product area

Benefits

• 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
• Glassdoor
• 3.1
• AI-powered product analytics and adoption platform for builders.
• Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
• http://www.pendo.io
• Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
• Represents job field similar to this job
• Engineering and Development
• Marketing
• Sales
• Accounting and Finance
• Management and Executive
• Trends of Total Sponsorships
• *2025
• (1)
• 2023
• (2)
• 2021
• Late Stage
• Total Funding
• $579.41M
• Key Investors
• JP Morgan
• Thoma Bravo

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-powered systems, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and agent orchestration frameworks
• Strong technical depth in system design, including choosing the right architecture, identifying failure modes early, and making tradeoffs that hold up across the product lifecycle
• Experience owning technical quality beyond your own features, including setting standards, catching problems in review, and improving shared infrastructure and tooling
• 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 judgment to decide when and how to apply them
• Production AI experience, including model deployment, monitoring pipelines, and latency, cost, and reliability optimization in a live environment
• Strong full-stack fundamentals with the ability to work 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 thinking, including the ability to ask whether something should be built before deciding how to build it
• 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 Sr. 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
• Experience fine-tuning foundation models and a clear point of view on when fine-tuning outperforms prompting 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 design
• Prior experience contributing to or launching a net-new team or product area

Required skills

• AI Latency, Cost, and Reliability Optimization, AI Model Deployment and Monitoring, Agent Orchestration, Diffusion Models, Full-Stack Development, LLM-Powered Systems, Model Evaluation, Product Thinking, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), System Design, Transformer Architectures