Staff Software Engineer (AI Innovation)

We are currently assisting our client, a large innovation-focused organization in the Pacific Northwest, with a search for a Software Engineer (AI Innovation).

Job Summary:

This role will design and evolve core AI Platform-as-a-Service capabilities that enable secure, scalable, and high-performance agentic workflows across enterprise systems. You will own foundational services such as shared memory, session management, semantic retrieval, and orchestration frameworks—while integrating authentication, logging/telemetry, and CI/CD into a production-grade platform. The ideal candidate is a staff-level individual contributor who excels in backend architecture, distributed systems, and modern LLM orchestration patterns, and can lead technical workstreams without stepping into people management.

Location: Greater Seattle Area (Eastside) – Hybrid (onsite 3 days/week)

US citizens and those authorized to work in the US are encouraged to apply.

Work sponsorship is available at this time.

Compensation Range: $180,000 – $225,000 base salary + equity (eligible) + annual bonus (eligible)

Benefits: Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off; medical/dental/vision; behavioral health and employee assistance; reimbursement and dependent care programs; short-term and long-term disability; life and AD&D insurance; 401(k); and an employee stock purchase plan (as eligible).

Role:

• Develop conceptual systems architecture and supporting technologies to enable new/enhanced platform functionality, emphasizing availability, reusability, interoperability, and security.
• Identify deficiencies in product/application code bases and drive improvements to overall code quality.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to define specifications and release documentation across the full SDLC.
• Conduct peer code reviews and help uphold engineering standards across the team.
• Maintain and evolve core AI platform services, including shared memory banks, session management, and central reasoning components.
• Architect and optimize modular agentic framework templates using standardized orchestration SDKs for complex, stateful workflows.
• Create and maintain standardized capability services (e.g., via Model Context Protocol) enabling secure orchestration across enterprise data platforms, customer systems, and distributed microservices.
• Integrate the AI Platform with enterprise infrastructure (authentication, logging pipelines, observability, CI/CD workflows).

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• Manage and optimize semantic retrieval architecture for high-speed, low-latency access to grounded enterprise knowledge through a unified discovery/retrieval engine.
• Engineer discovery agents that ingest, validate, and cite evidence from unified multimodal data environments using semantic retrieval and neural search.
• Establish agent identity and access protocols so autonomous actions are authenticated, authorized, and logged under secure service principals.
• Implement and scale automated AI performance benchmarking to monitor mission success and proactively detect regressions (reasoning quality, guardrails, autonomous decisions).
• Serve as a primary responder for systemic platform anomalies, using distributed tracing and telemetry to diagnose and resolve bottlenecks in multi-agent reasoning chains.
• Maintain internal documentation and SDKs that enable other teams to onboard their use cases onto the AI platform.
• Support off-hours work as required, including rotational on-call coverage.

Required:

• 5+ years of backend software development experience with strong API design and microservices focus.
• 5+ years building APIs with emphasis on security, reliability, and performance.
• 5+ years of microservices debugging and performance testing experience.
• 5+ years working in agile development environments.
• 1+ year hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, function calling, and/or orchestration frameworks.
• Expertise architecting containerized autonomous workloads across container orchestration and serverless runtimes (high-availability, event-driven architectures).
• Extensive experience managing semantic indices and multimodal pipelines that unify structured and unstructured data for grounded agent behavior.
• Expert proficiency in asynchronous orchestration frameworks, type-safe schema validation, and high-performance API gateway patterns; strong command of statically typed systems for highly concurrent, low-latency backend services.
• Mastery of stateful graph orchestration and multi-agent coordination frameworks, including cyclic reasoning loops and automated task delegation.
• Proficiency designing semantic retrieval layers, attribute-aware discovery, and stateful persistence for long-term context.

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• Deep understanding of MCP, A2A patterns, REST/gRPC APIs, OAuth2 security, and function-calling mechanics.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices for prompt/model deployment workflows.
• Experience leading technical workstreams and translating business problems into AI-native architectures.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to operate under pressure during incident/crisis scenarios.
• Self-directed, organized, detail-oriented, and strong problem-solving skills.

Recommended:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field.
• Master’s degree or PhD focused on Distributed Systems, AI Orchestration, or Machine Learning.
• Cloud or data engineering certifications (or equivalent experience) relevant to multi-agent systems and autonomous reasoning.
• 3+ years experience with distributed cache technologies.
• Experience deploying and configuring cloud platform resources.
• Experience supporting high-traffic digital product environments (e.g., consumer-facing, transactional, or marketplace ecosystems).
• Proficiency with common productivity/collaboration tooling (docs, sheets, slides, email).

About Hansell Tierney:

Hansell Tierney is one of the premier staffing and recruiting companies in the Pacific Northwest. Launched in 2001, we are a woman-owned business that serves and staffs Northwest organizations by doing things the right way, not just the easiest way. Hansell Tierney partners with candidates and clients to match the best candidates with interesting local opportunities. We navigate every relationship with the highest level of discretion and service while holding ourselves accountable to our promises. Our business thrives on our deep understanding of the job market and our ability to skillfully tailor our recruitment process to meet our clients’ unique needs.