Staff Software Engineer

About the role

The Emerging Team at Pendo is building AI-native products for our product experience platform from the ground up. We are looking for a technical leader to design and ship agentic workflows and LLM-powered features that redefine how software teams interact with user data.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and deploy production-grade AI systems including RAG pipelines and agentic workflows.
• Determine the appropriate technical approach for model integration, choosing between prompting, fine-tuning, or alternative architectures.
• Establish evaluation frameworks to monitor model performance, identify hallucinations, and implement reliability guardrails.
• Manage the full lifecycle of model deployment, including latency optimization, cost management, and system observability.
• Work across the full stack to deliver complete, user-facing AI features.
• Collaborate with product and design stakeholders to define problem spaces and prioritize development efforts.
• Maintain technical expertise in transformers, diffusion models, and orchestration frameworks to guide team strategy.

Requirements

• Proven track record of shipping LLM-powered systems, specifically RAG and agent orchestration.
• Experience setting technical direction and architectural patterns for AI engineering across teams.
• Ability to influence product strategy and align cross-functional stakeholders on AI initiatives.
• Expertise in designing evaluation suites and mitigating model bias or hallucinations.
• Deep understanding of modern model architectures like transformers and diffusion models.
• Experience managing AI production requirements, such as monitoring, deployment, and cost-performance optimization.
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals.
• Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs to both technical and executive audiences.
• Strong product judgment regarding the viability and necessity of new features.

Nice to have

• Experience with fine-tuning foundation models.
• Familiarity with AI safety protocols and guardrail frameworks.
• Proficiency with orchestration tools like LangChain or LlamaIndex.
• Background in SaaS or product analytics.
• Experience launching net-new products or teams.

Skills & tools

• LLMs
• RAG pipelines
• Agentic workflows
• Transformers
• Diffusion models
• LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• Full-stack development

Practical notes

• Compensation includes equity, a 401(k) match, and comprehensive health benefits with $0 premium options.
• Pendo is an equal opportunity employer.
• Applicants requiring reasonable accommodation for the recruitment process may contact accommodation@pendo.io.