Pendo

Staff Software Engineer (AI)

New York, NY · Staff+

Sponsorship not specified$245k-$275kDetected 13 days ago

Full-Stack DevelopmentSparkNLPLLMsRAGAI OrchestrationSalesforceResearchLeadershipCommunication

About the role

This is not an AI layer added to existing product; it is a deliberate bet on what product intelligence looks like next.
As a Staff Software Engineer (AI), you will sit at the intersection of deep technical capability and strong product judgment.
This role is based in our New York office.

We build from the ground up to explore, prototype, and ship AI-native experiences that change how software teams understand and serve their users.
The team operates with high autonomy, moves quickly, and builds products without clear precedents.
You will design and build production-grade AI systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features, while making clear tradeoffs across prompting, fine-tuning, architecture, evaluation, and deployment.
You will also partner closely with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to frame the right problems and communicate technical decisions clearly.
Design and build AI-native systems, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered product features.
You will take ideas from prototype through production and ensure they can support real users.
Own model deployment, monitoring, latency optimization, cost management, and reliability at scale.
Partner closely with product and design to frame problems well before implementation begins.
You will push back when the framing is wrong and help the team stay focused on what is worth building.

You're rewiring how you work around them.
Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for AI systems across teams, establish architectural patterns, make foundational model strategy decisions, and raise the bar for AI engineering quality.
Experience owning outcomes across team boundaries, including identifying capability gaps, driving alignment across engineering and product, and influencing how a broader organization approaches AI.
Production Productionize AI experience, including model deployment, monitoring pipelines, and latency, cost, and reliability optimization in live environments.
Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to engineers, product managers, and executives.
Experience fine-tuning foundation models and a clear point of view on when fine-tuning outperforms prompting-based approaches.
Familiarity with AI safety considerations, guardrail frameworks, and responsible deployment practices.

Instrument and evaluate model outputs rigorously by defining evaluation frameworks and identifying hallucinations early.

The expected salary range for this role to be performed in New York, NY is $245,000 - $275,000.

Highly competitive, employer-heavy coverage, including $0 premium options, strong 401(k) match, equity, and flexible time off.

Our Emerging Team is focused on building AI Products for our product experience (PX) platform.
EEOC: We are an
If you think you may require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please send a request to: accommodation@pendo.io.

equal opportunity employer and believe having diverse teams where everyone brings their whole self to Pendo is key to our success.
We are an equal opportunity employer and believe having diverse teams where everyone brings their whole self to Pendo is key to our success.
Pendo is committed to working with, and providing access and reasonable accommodation to, applicants with mental and/or physical disabilities.

This listing is sourced directly from Pendo's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.