Staff Applied AI Engineer

The Applied AI team works embedded with Addepar’s strategic clients to identify where AI can transform their workflows and build those capabilities from scratch. You’ll collaborate closely with clients, prototype solutions, validate their effectiveness, and partner with core engineering teams to deliver these innovations as scalable products for all customers.

What You’ll Do

• Set the technical direction for AI engineering across the team, including agent architecture patterns, evaluation methodologies, deployment strategies, and monitoring frameworks.
• Design the AI platform layer, including shared agent frameworks, tool integrations, and evaluation infrastructure that the team will build upon.
• Work directly with clients on the most complex engagements, identifying new problem domains, designing AI capabilities for workflows that have never been automated, and ensuring production quality.
• Make high-stakes decisions on AI readiness, balancing speed with reliability in a domain where outcomes are critical.
• Drive the handoff from prototype to product, collaborating with core engineering teams to generalize client-specific capabilities for all customers.
• Lead production quality for AI systems by designing observability, establishing SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and building operational practices that ensure AI reliability.
• Mentor and grow AI and full-stack engineers, setting the technical and cultural bar for a new team.
• Shape product direction by translating insights from client engagements into roadmap priorities.

Who You Are

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Professional experience with Python (the team’s primary language).
• Deep experience building and operating AI/LLM-powered systems in production, including agent architectures, multi-model orchestration, and evaluation at scale.
• A track record of designing technical systems that other engineers build on, thinking in platforms and patterns rather than individual features.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar).
• Proven ability to take products or capabilities from zero to one, excelling in both problem identification and system design.
• Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders to scope and deliver technical work.
• Strong judgment in ambiguous, high-stakes environments, knowing when to move fast and when to proceed with caution.
• Ability to lead technical direction without formal authority, influencing across teams through quality of thinking and work.
• Excellent communication skills, credible with clients, engineers, and executive leadership.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Mathematics, or another quantitative field, or equivalent experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing multi-service AI platform architectures, including model serving, agent orchestration, and evaluation infrastructure.
• Experience with additional backend languages (e.g., Java).
• Financial services domain knowledge (e.g., portfolios, trading, document management, regulatory workflows).
• Experience with production observability and SaaS operational excellence at scale.
• Background in developer experience or internal platform work, building tools that transform how engineering teams operate.