Sr. Staff Engineer

About The Role

The AI Platform team enables product teams across Betterment to build useful AI-powered features quickly, enjoyably, and responsibly. As Sr Staff Engineer, you will work with a team of senior/staff engineers delivering an expanding set of AI capabilities as well as shared infrastructure, LLM evaluation frameworks, and internal libraries. You will help shape and lead the technical direction of our AI product development strategy, working closely with engineering leadership. You will collaborate with product and compliance partners to ensure Betterment's AI capabilities are developed with the rigor that our customers and regulators expect. By joining us in the early days of our AI product efforts, you will have significant influence over how the organization delivers exciting features into the Betterment product across all lines of business.

This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range we would offer for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees. New York City: $230,000 - $270,000

We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, life and AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, EAP, commuter and parking benefits FSA/HSA, and 401(k) with employer match as well as a flexible PTO policy. This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

What We’re Looking For

A strong technical lead capable of establishing the strategic vision for Betterment’s AI systems while also working hands-on alongside senior and staff IC colleagues to build it into reality. Deep expertise in LLM systems, including prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and evaluation systems. Experience operating AI features in production, ensuring quality and auditability via online and offline validation, automated monitoring, and human-in-the-loop oversight. Comfort operating at the frontier. The ability and drive to stay current with emerging tools, techniques, and best practices within the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem. Clear judgment about when to use AI and when not to, maintaining a grounded, pragmatic perspective on what we should ship to production today. Proven track record leading successful projects that affect and development workflows used by multiple teams. Fullstack development experience including React, GraphQL, and one or more server-side languages (Ruby, Java, TypeScript, C#, Python, etc.). Experience making sound build vs buy decisions. Ability to build trust and processes that transcend discipline and team boundaries. Principled approach to balancing the need to move quickly today with the need to move quickly tomorrow, with an appreciation of how to meet high standards for customer quality and regulatory requirements.

Join a team built on these core values

• Change lives
• Be a part of a community of innovators working to transform financial outcomes for real people
• Your work will make an impact, always laddering up to our mission; to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease
• Set audacious goals
• Win together
• Value all perspectives
• Simplify financial services
• Our Commitment To Your Total Well-being

What Happens Next

• We’ll take a few weeks to review all applications. If we’d like to spend more time with you, we’ll reach out to arrange next steps, which will include 3-4 sets of meetings with your future colleagues.
• In the interview process, we’ll look to learn more about your skills, experiences, capabilities, and motivators. Many of our questions will be aimed at understanding how you might operate here at Betterment.
• Depending on the role, we may ask you to complete a case study exercise or technical assessments, as we want to collect a robust set of data points to better inform our decisions.
• On average, it takes us around 3-5 weeks to make a hiring decision, depending on your availability and sense of urgency.