Staff Software Engineer, Engineering AI Team

📝 About the Role

We are hiring an AI Staff Software Engineer to design, build, and operate the production systems and developer-facing platform that other engineering teams depend on. The Engineering AI team aims to accelerate the velocity of product engineering teams at Second Nature through the use of AI workflows and tools.

This is a hands-on staff role on a small, senior team that ships to production every day. You will own systems end to end — architecture through operation — and you will be writing and merging code daily, not just directing it.

We hold a single, high bar: you would clear the staff-engineer bar on any strong product team. We index on engineering strength and shipping velocity over any particular tool or domain — great engineers ramp into ours fast, and we expect you to.

How We Work

• We deploy to production multiple times a day, every day; over 100 reviewed PRs a month on a small team. Small batches, fast feedback. We ship quickly and safely.

• High autonomy, low process overhead, real ownership. You pick up ambiguous problems and drive them to shipped, observable, operated systems.

• Ramp expectation: you'll open PRs in your first week and be shipping to production at the team's cadence within two weeks; regardless of prior domain experience. We hire people who ramp fast and ship.

What you’ll do

• Own the design, architecture, and delivery of production backend services and distributed, stateful workflow systems — end to end.

• Ship daily: small, well-tested, reviewed changes merged continuously via a trunk-based, PR-per-change workflow.

• Using our AI coding agent workflow, produce high-quality, thoroughly tested code. You will apply your experience and expertise into detailed upfront feature scoping and planning, so the agent can execute on implementing the code.

• Own the reliability and observability of what you ship — tracing, metrics, structured logging, alerting, and production debugging.

• Drive architectural decisions for scalability, performance, and maintainability; resolve complex technical issues and optimize systems under real load.

• Raise the bar through code review, and by improving the team's developer tooling, CI/CD, and workflow.

• Translate ambiguous product and business requirements into shipped systems, working across product and engineering stakeholders.

• Mentor engineers and help set technical direction; communicate decisions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Master our AI workflow: Integrate our AI tooling while rigorously auditing and refining AI-generated code and tests to meet our quality bar.

• Ship rapidly and reliably: Consistently deliver high-impact PRs with minimal rework by ensuring thorough local testing and CI/CD readiness before review.

• Plan with pragmatism: Adopt our norm of writing lightweight plans (outlining phases, trade-offs, and "good enough" criteria) for non-trivial work before coding.

• Own a full experiment: Drive at least one rapid learning loop completely from hypothesis and implementation to measurement and conclusion.

• Operate with high agency: Drive progress autonomously, raise blockers proactively in real-time, and maintain momentum without step-by-step direction.

✅ Key Outcomes (90+ days)

• Drive continuous experimentation: Run rapid learning loops that clearly connect your daily engineering output to measurable improvements in developer velocity.

• Own complex platform architecture: Autonomously take ambiguous problem spaces from concept to shipped product without over-engineering the solution.

• Set the quality standard: Cultivate an opinionated codebase with solid abstractions and high-value integration tests, actively filtering out low-value AI boilerplate.

• Optimize for speed: Consistently break down complex, multi-layered initiatives into manageable, high-velocity deliverables.

• Act as a force multiplier: Elevate the broader team's velocity through reliable execution, seamless end-to-end ownership, and transparent technical planning.

About you

• An "all-in" mindset toward AI in software engineering. You are enthusiastic about the future of AI & engineering, with a clear drive to contribute to how AI will revolutionize our industry.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of designing, shipping, and operating production systems at scale — you clearly meet a staff-level bar.

• You ship constantly. Demonstrated comfort with high-velocity, trunk-based development, small frequently-merged PRs, and ramping into an unfamiliar codebase to deliver production changes within your first week.

• Deep expertise in a modern backend language. We use Python & TypeScript; we value engineering strength over exact stack match and expect strong engineers to pick ours up quickly.

• Strong command of software architecture and distributed-systems patterns (microservices, event-driven systems, domain-driven design, etc.).

• Production data systems: PostgreSQL and a caching/coordination layer such as Redis.

• Cloud-native on AWS (or equivalent), with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and containerized services (ECS/Fargate, Kubernetes, or similar).

• First-class testing discipline — you write unit and integration tests as part of delivery — and strong ownership of reliability and observability (e.g., Datadog: tracing, metrics, logs).

• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, and clear written and verbal communication.

• Pirate Ship; not a cruise ship. Bias towards action.

• Massive Growth takes massive growth. We embrace challenges to increase our impact.

• Grow the Pie. We focus on results so our customers & their customers win. Triple Win!

• Purple Heart. We put the team before ourselves.

• Extreme Ownership. See something? Say something; right the ship to get us back on course.

• Be a moment maker. We aim to shatter the status quo.

🩺 Health First: Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, & 401K Plan

📍Location: Work remotely from anywhere in the US

📆 Flexibility: Open PTO and sick days

🤩 The Product: Beyond the awards and 5-star reviews, our clients and customers love what they can do with the world’s first Resident Experience Platform

🤗 Diverse, Inclusive Culture: We embrace employees from all backgrounds with openness and respect

💻 Training: A supportive team to help you grow your career and unlock your full potential

🚀 Growth: The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a fast-growing startup that’s designing and developing an exciting category

Second Nature is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We take action to ensure equal employment opportunities for all candidates and employees and to provide employees with a workplace free of discrimination and harassment. Our hiring decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected by federal and/or state law.