Sr. Software Engineer II - AI

About the role

The Sr. Software Engineer II - AI will lead the build of GenAI-powered product experiences and the shared AI platform infrastructure that powers them. This includes RAG pipelines over the iHerb catalog and customer reviews, LLM-driven personalization, a conversational Wellness Agent, agentic workflow systems, and the evals and MLOps layer that makes AI features production-grade and repeatable.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production AI features: RAG pipelines, LLM-driven recommendations, conversational agents, or agentic workflow automation.
• Build the shared AI platform layer: retrieval infrastructure, eval frameworks, model monitoring, guardrails, and observability.
• Write LLM applications and integrations with marketing platforms, BI tools, or customer-facing product surfaces.
• Evaluate model and feature quality using structured eval frameworks; iterate on prompts, retrieval strategies, and model selection using data.
• Use AI-driven SDLC tooling such as Claude Code as a daily practice for both AI and non-AI code.
• Coincide with the Personalization team to align GenAI product features with existing ML personalization signals.
• Document AI system design decisions, evaluation results, and operational lessons in the shared knowledge base.
• Own the observability of AI systems you build: latency, cost, quality drift, and error rates; participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• AI-driven SDLC: hands-on experience shipping production code with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor.
• Full-stack awareness: comfortable contributing across layers of the stack when needed; purely single-layer specialists are not the target profile.
• Production ownership: experience owning features end-to-end from spec through deployment, observability, and on-call.
• Code quality fundamentals: strong grasp of software design principles, automated testing, code review, and CI/CD.
• Autonomous: drives technical decisions within the team; mentors junior engineers.
• Python proficiency: comfortable building and operating production LLM applications.
• Specializations: RAG and retrieval systems, LLM evaluation, agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar), or LLM-based workflow automation.
• Prompt engineering, context window management, and LLM output quality tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embedding models, or semantic search.
• High degree of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Excellent organization skills and ability to multi-task.

Preferred

• Exposure to MLOps tooling or model deployment pipelines.
• Contributions to internal developer tooling, golden path standards, or SDLC process improvements.
• Experience with e-commerce platforms, product catalogs, or high-traffic consumer applications.
• Experience working in globally distributed teams.
• Track record of documenting architectural decisions, writing RFCs, or contributing to engineering wikis.

Equipment Knowledge

• Experience with Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
• Experience with Google Business Suite (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms) preferred.

Experience Requirements

• Generally requires a minimum of 10+ years of software engineering experience.

Education Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field preferred, or a combination of education and equivalent work experience.

Work Environment

• Hectic, fast-paced with multi-level distractions.
• Professional, yet casual work environment.
• Office / Warehouse environment.

Compensation

The expected salary range for this role is $187,000.00 - $235,000.00 USD. The actual base pay offered will be determined by factors such as the candidate's relevant experience, education, geographic location, and internal equity.