Staff AI Engineer

About the role

This role maps to what many organizations call a Staff Software Engineer, where deep technical expertise and cross-team influence come together. You’ll move where the need is greatest: embedding with teams to solve their hardest problems while building the shared standards, tools, and practices that lift every team.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership
  • Remain a hands-on engineer: write code, contribute to architectural decisions, and ship; your technical credibility is the foundation of your influence.
  • Embed with teams as a focused technical resource: accelerate delivery, address deep technical challenges, mentor engineers, and transition out once the team is unblocked and empowered.
  • Take ownership of the hardest technical AI decisions facing the teams you support; provide the clarity and decisiveness that enables teams to move forward.
  • Identify AI related patterns and shared needs across teams; you’ll surface them into the shared AI platform and contribute directly to its growth.
  • Build and ship production-grade backend services that power AI-driven features residents and associates rely on.
  • Tune prompts, reasoning chains, and retrieval strategies including RAG/LLM as Wiki against Invitation Homes data.
  • Own observability of AI systems in production: monitor performance, safety, and cost across LLM-driven features.
• Knowledge & Standards
  • Serve as an authority and mentor across core AI technologies and architectural patterns used throughout the organization.
  • Shape architectural decisions with a long-term, strategic mindset: optimizing for agentic scalability, maintainability, and alignment with business goals.
  • Apply core engineering principles to navigate unfamiliar technologies with confidence; adapt and operate effectively across varied tech stacks.
  • Maintain a broad understanding of engineering workflows, standards, architectural decision records (ADRs), and the system landscape to provide relevant context and promote alignment across teams.
  • Create reference implementations of agentic use cases: prompt engineering practices and use-case patterns on top of the shared eval frameworks and MCP/LLM gateways owned at the platform level.
• Communication & Collaboration
  • Write and present proposals that influence technical direction across multiple teams.
  • Facilitate architectural reviews and technical deep dives with clarity and empathy.
  • Coach engineers in how to document, diagram, and communicate their technical thinking effectively.
  • Translate complex technical risk into understandable trade-offs for stakeholders at all levels.
  • Drive conversations toward clarity: reduce complexity, build alignment across teams, and help everyone commit and move forward once a direction is set.
• Leadership & Culture
  • Act as a multiplier for the engineering organization: raise the bar through mentorship, coaching, and influence across teams.
  • Facilitate cross-team learning: architecture guilds, postmortems, engineering summits, or regular knowledge-sharing sessions.
  • Own and improve AI engineering processes, standards, and tools that support a healthy and effective engineering organization.
  • Mentor engineers on AI at multiple levels, helping them grow in technical depth and expand their reach.
  • Maintain a bias to action across the teams you support: draw on AI tooling and insights to help teams automate the mundane.
  • Model intellectual humility, curiosity, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you; the culture you carry shapes the culture of the teams you touch.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with a demonstrated track record of technical impact beyond team boundaries.
• 1+ years developing and deploying production-ready AI features including LLM-dependent applications, RAG systems, agents, and evals.
• Deep expertise in software architecture, system design, and distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of LLM evaluation methods: prompt testing, hallucination detection, and cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Experience building custom eval pipelines using techniques like model-as-a-judge or embedding similarity.
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI, preferably in TypeScript.
• Experience creating shared tools, frameworks, standards, or guidance adopted across multiple teams.
• Exceptional communication skills (written and verbal) with experience writing proposals and influencing technical direction at a department level.
• A track record of mentoring and coaching engineers across levels and teams.
• A drive to raise the bar: for yourself, the standards you champion, and the engineers you develop.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD practices, and modern iterative software delivery.
• A degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS, including Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS.
• Practical experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, REST APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with AWS Bedrock, LangGraph, Snowflake, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

Benefits

Annual bonus program
Health, dental, vision, and life insurance
Long-term and short-term disability insurance
Generous paid time off plans including vacation accrual, sick time, standard holidays, and floating holidays
401(k) with company matching contributions
Awesome work environment with casual dress
Team events and gatherings (Pre- and Post-Covid)
Invitation Homes is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and innovative environment with the best associates.

Pay

$120,000.00 - $208,000.00, plus individuals may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus.

Schedule

Standard office working environment that may be busy and noisy at times.