Staff Software Engineer AI

Position Summary

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in building, developing, and deploying production-grade conversational AI solutions—well beyond prototyping—ensuring scalable, real-world impact. Additionally, they possess a human-centered AI approach, effectively partnering with SMEs to incorporate domain expertise into evaluation frameworks, metrics, and continuous model improvement.

Responsibilities

• Apply Generative AI techniques to solve complex business problems by identifying opportunities where AI can enhance existing software systems and create new intelligent features.
• Integrate Generative AI models and capabilities into production software applications, bridging the gap between Generative AI research and practical software engineering implementation.
• Evaluate and select appropriate Generative AI models, tools, and techniques for specific use cases, considering factors like performance, cost, maintainability, and business impact.
• Write high-quality code that combines traditional software engineering with AI components, ensuring robust integration, proper error handling, and comprehensive test coverage.
• Review and translate product requirements into technical solutions that leverage AI effectively, designing systems that seamlessly blend AI capabilities with core application functionality.
• Lead design and code reviews for AI-enhanced applications, ensuring best practices in both software engineering and AI implementation while maintaining Mercury standards.
• Lead multiple sprint teams to deliver AI-powered features and improvements, addressing technical challenges in integrating AI into existing software systems.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineering teams to identify AI opportunities and translate them into practical software solutions.
• Mentor engineers on how to effectively incorporate AI into their software development practices, promoting understanding of AI capabilities and limitations.
• Drive practical AI adoption across teams by demonstrating how to effectively combine software engineering principles with AI technologies.
• Collaborate with product managers to estimate effort for AI-enhanced features, prioritize AI integration opportunities, and deliver measurable business value through AI implementation.

Qualifications

• Minimum: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or other related fields Or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Preferred: Master’s Degree in Data Science.
• Minimum: 7+ years software engineering experience with proven experience in cutting-edge Technologies and/or those used at Mercury.
• 3+ years hands-on experience leading multi-team engineering initiatives for building features in a distributed application systems environment.
• Preferred: 5 or more years of experience with Data Science, NLP, AI, etc.
• 5 or more years of experience working on production ready conversational AI related initiatives including leveraging closed and open source models and libraries including enterprise platform.
• Experience with Agentic AI, RAG, Prompt, human in the loop evaluation.
• Experience with product data analytics.

About The Company

At Mercury, we have been guided by our purpose to help people reduce risk and overcome unexpected events for more than 60 years. We are one team with a common goal to help others. Everyone needs insurance and we can’t imagine a world without it. Our team will encourage you to grow, make time to have fun, and work together to make great things happen. We embrace the strengths and values of each team member. We believe in having diverse perspectives where everyone is included, to serve customers from all walks of life. We care about our people, and we mean it. We reward our talented professionals with a competitive salary, bonus potential, and a variety of benefits to help our team members reach their health, retirement, and professional goals.

Perks And Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Paid time off (vacation time, sick time, 9 paid Company holidays, volunteer hours)
• Incentive bonus programs (potential for holiday bonus, referral bonus, and performance-based bonus)
• Medical, dental, vision, life, and pet insurance
• 401 (k) retirement savings plan with company match
• Engaging work environment
• Promotional opportunities
• Education assistance
• Professional and personal development opportunities
• Company recognition program
• Health and wellbeing resources, including free mental wellbeing therapy/coaching sessions, child and eldercare resources, and more