Staff Engineer, AI Platform

Pivotal Health

$120K — $160K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of software engineering experience with a focus on platform or infrastructure development.
  • Proven track record of owning and developing technical systems used by multiple teams.
  • Experience building developer tooling and environments where usability and reliability are crucial.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML technologies and systems, particularly in observability and experimentation.
  • Strong API and SDK design skills that enhance developer efficiency while managing complexity.
  • High comfort level with ambiguity and capacity for pragmatic decision-making in greenfield projects.
  • Proven ability to collaborate and influence across different functions without relying solely on authority.

Responsibilities

  • Own the evolution of the internal Agent SDK and related developer libraries.
  • Define standard engineering practices for AI system behavior and deployment.
  • Develop an observability framework for AI systems, including telemetry and cost tracking.
  • Create reliable operational workflows that help detect issues before they impact business.
  • Lead the design of experimentation tools for AI and agent-based systems.
  • Enhance comparative analysis of AI performance metrics and configurations.
  • Build internal tools to facilitate company-wide AI adoption and usability.

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation, including equity
  • Full health, dental, and vision coverage
  • Retirement savings plan through 401(k)
  • Flexible time off
  • Opportunities for company-wide connection and events
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Engineer, AI Platform to build the shared engineering foundations that make AI systems at Pivotal reliable, observable, and easy to adopt across the company.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who wants to build platform infrastructure, not just advise on it. You'll own key parts of our AI platform surface, including our Agent SDK, AI observability stack, experimentation and evaluation systems, and greenfield internal tooling for MCPs and AI-powered app builders.

You'll report to the Head of AI/ML Engineering and work closely with applied AI, backend, data, product, and operations partners. This role is intentionally designed as a builder-first staff role. Over time, you may help shape and guide a team around these systems, but success in the role does not depend on moving into people management. We see technical leadership and long-term IC growth as first-class paths.

Just as important, this role is about helping Pivotal become an AI-first organization. We want someone who is personally excellent at using AI in their own day-to-day work and can turn that instinct into shared workflows, tooling, and habits that raise the company's overall capability.

What You'll Do
  • Own the evolution of our shared Agent SDK and adjacent developer-facing libraries.
  • Define the default engineering patterns for agent runtime behavior, tool use, structured outputs, context management, retries, testing, and deployment.
  • Build the observability layer for AI systems, including tracing, prompt and model version visibility, tool-call telemetry, cost tracking, latency, failure modes, and fallback behavior.
  • Create practical dashboards, alerts, and operational workflows that let us catch regressions before the business feels them.
  • Lead the design of our experimentation and evaluation platform for model-backed and agent-backed systems.
  • Improve how we compare prompts, providers, retrieval strategies, model versions, and workflow designs.
  • Build greenfield internal tooling that accelerates company-wide AI adoption, especially around MCP-style tools, app-builder patterns, and reusable internal AI primitives.
  • Help define what great AI-enabled work looks like inside the company by modeling strong usage patterns and turning them into scalable defaults for other teams.
  • Turn fragile or manual workflows into well-instrumented platform capabilities with good defaults and clear ownership.
  • Partner with engineers and product teams to identify the highest-leverage shared investments, then drive them from design through production.
  • Raise the technical bar through architecture work, design reviews, implementation, mentoring, and strong engineering judgment.
What Success Looks Like

In the first 6 to 12 months, strong outcomes in this role would include:
  • a clearly adopted internal Agent SDK with defaults, documentation, and developer ergonomics
  • standardized tracing and observability across AI workflows
  • a lightweight but real release process for model and prompt changes
  • stronger experiment and regression tooling for both statistical ML systems and agent workflows
  • less notebook- and runbook-driven operational work
  • new internal platform capabilities that make it meaningfully easier for teams across the company to adopt AI safely
Who You Are
  • You are a strong software engineer first, with staff-level judgment and a track record of owning technical systems that multiple teams rely on.
  • You have deep experience building platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling, ideally in environments where reliability and usability both matter.
  • You have experience with AI or ML platform problems such as agent runtimes, LLM tooling, inference infrastructure, experimentation systems, evaluation frameworks, or model observability.
  • You know how to design APIs, SDKs, and reusable abstractions that improve developer velocity without hiding important complexity.
  • You are an AI power user yourself. You actively use AI to accelerate engineering work, investigation, debugging, design, and knowledge work, and you have strong judgment about where it helps and where it does not.
  • You are comfortable operating in ambiguous, greenfield areas and can make pragmatic scope decisions without overbuilding.
  • You can work cross-functionally and lead through influence, clarity, and execution rather than title alone.
  • You enjoy being close to the code and architecture, even when operating at broad technical scope.
We'd Be Especially Excited If You Have
  • strong Python experience in production systems
  • experience with FastAPI or similar backend frameworks
  • experience with GCP or comparable cloud infrastructure
  • experience with LLM platforms, agent frameworks, or prompt/version management systems
  • experience with experimentation, evals, A/B testing, or statistical decision systems
  • experience with observability stacks such as OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, LangSmith, Braintrust, Helicone, Datadog, Grafana, or similar tooling
  • experience building internal developer platforms, workflow platforms, or reusable application scaffolding
  • experience in healthcare, payments, or other operationally complex domains where software quality directly affects business outcomes
Why This Role Is Interesting
  • The problems are real, not speculative. You'll be working on AI systems that sit in important operational workflows, not side experiments.
  • The scope is unusually high leverage. Success here improves how multiple teams across the company build and ship.
  • The platform surface is real, but still early. You'll have the chance to define the right foundations before the architecture calcifies.
  • The role sits close to product and outcomes. You won't be building platform in a vacuum.
  • You'll help shape how the company actually works. Part of the job is making Pivotal much better at using AI across functions, not just building backend systems in isolation.
  • You can stay deeply technical. If you eventually want to help build a team around this area, great. If you want to remain a staff-level technical leader, that is equally valuable.


Benefits Include:
  • Competitive compensation, including equity
  • Full health, dental, and vision coverage
  • Retirement savings plan through 401(k)
  • Flexible time off
  • Opportunities for company-wide connection and events

Ready to Make an Impact?We're building something meaningful; and we want you on the team.

Bring your ideas, curiosity, and drive, and let's transform healthcare reimbursement together.

Employment Information

Work Authorization

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future employer sponsorship.

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