Sr. Staff Engineer

A day in the life

• Work with a team of senior/staff engineers building the foundation that enables all Betterment teams to deploy AI features.
• Define and drive Betterment's AI platform strategy – the shared infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, internal libraries, and guardrails that allow product teams to build AI features with confidence and speed.
• Lead high-leverage projects that expand our organization’s AI technical capabilities, where AI organically enhances existing product value.
• Partner with product teams to ship customer-facing AI functionality to production. Develop broad Betterment domain expertise in the process.
• Partner with legal and compliance leaders to scale processes that enable teams to build AI functionality quickly and responsibly within a regulated financial services environment.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers, sharing your experience to expand their impact and accelerate their growth.

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.

Compensation (New York City): $230,000 - $270,000 base salary, plus competitive equity package, health/dental/vision benefits, 401(k) match, flexible PTO, and potential incentive bonus.