Staff Software Engineer

Work Location:  Burlington, Massachusetts

Shift:

Department:  LS-DI-EN E2E Prod Eng Content & User and Operations

Recruiter:  Anthony Johnson

This information is for internals only. Please do not share outside of the organization.

Your Role:

We are looking for a Staff Applied AI Engineer to build scalable, production-grade backend applications that leverage large and complex datasets. This role is software engineering first, with a strong emphasis on designing reliable systems that ingest, process, and serve data to power modern applications and AI-driven solutions.

You will work closely with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers to build robust backend services, data-intensive applications, and production AI systems. Success in this role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, practical experience working with data throughout its lifecycle, and the ability to design systems that are scalable, maintainable, and reliable in production.

Essential Job Functions:

Lead technical strategy for AI/LLM systems across multiple products

Architect retrieval, orchestration, agentic, and evaluation systems that run reliably in production

Set the standards for AI safety, evaluation, observability, and responsible rollout in a regulated context

Mentor Junior-level engineers into strong AI engineers; Employ AI Native development skills to multiply the productivity (Claude, etc.)

Lead the frontier: evaluate new models, techniques, and tools, and bring the right ones into the team

Design, develop, and maintain scalable Python applications and backend services.

Build systems that ingest, validate, transform, and manage structured and unstructured data in production environments.

Design data models and storage solutions that support scalable, high-performance applications.

Develop reusable components for data processing, validation, enrichment, and feature generation.

Who You Are

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related quantitative field.

At least 3 years of hands-on experience in machine learning, data science, search relevance, or ranking systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep recent time leading production AI/LLM systems

Proven expertise in Python and ML frameworks (MLFlow, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-  learn, or equivalent).

Strong background in statistical analysis, data exploration, and working with  large-scale datasets.

Experience with feature engineering, data preprocessing, and data

Seasoned hands-on coder; still writes production Python regularly

Seasoned system designer for AI systems at scale, retrieval, agents, evaluation, latency, and cost, vector databases/pipelines

Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade backend applications.

Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and distributed systems.

Strong SQL skills and experience working with relational databases; familiarity with NoSQL databases or modern data storage technologies is a plus.

Solid understanding of data engineering fundamentals, including data quality, validation, transformation, modeling, and efficient storage.

Experience designing systems that process large datasets reliably and efficiently.

Experience with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or AWS.

Experience using Docker, Git, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and modern software engineering best practices.

Core engineering stack

Languages: Python, REST API, Pandas, NumPy

Cloud and infrastructure: AWS Services and/or GCP, Kubernetes, Bedrock

Distributed systems: event-driven architectures, including Kafka

Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc.

Vector Databases like Qdrant

Nice to have Skills:

Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration.

Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging platforms such as Kafka.

Familiarity with ML model deployment and inference pipelines

Location

This role can be based in either our St. Louis, MO or Burlington, MA office and requires a weekly onsite presence

Pay Range for this position: $110,500 - $165,900. The offer range represents the anticipated low and high end of the base pay compensation for this position. The actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level of experience, education, skills, and other job-related factors. Position may be eligible for sales or performance-based bonuses. Benefits offered by the Company include health insurance, paid time off (PTO), retirement contributions, and other perquisites. For more information click here:  https://careers.emdgroup.com/us/en/benefits

The Company is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. No employee or applicant for employment will be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, gender identity, transgender status, marital status, or any other classification protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.  This policy of Equal Employment Opportunity applies to all policies and programs relating to recruitment and hiring, promotion, compensation, benefits, discipline, termination, and all other terms and conditions of employment. Any applicant or employee who believes they have been discriminated against by the Company or anyone acting on behalf of the Company must report any concerns to their Human Resources Business Partner, Legal, or Compliance immediately. The Company will not retaliate against any individual because they made a good faith report of discrimination.