Sr. Staff Engineer
Leads AI platform strategy and infrastructure for deploying AI features across Betterment's products, partnering with product, compliance, and engineering teams. Requires deep LLM expertise, fullstack experience with React/GraphQL/server languages, and production AI operations in a regulated environment.
About the job
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.
Skills
Llm Systems, Prompt Engineering, Agentic Workflows, Evaluation Systems, React, GraphQL, Ruby, TypeScript, Python, Java, Automated Monitoring
Similar jobs
ML Engineering jobs
Harvey
San Francisco, CA
Leads the design and operation of reliable, scalable model infrastructure powering AI inference across multiple providers. Requires 7+ years of distributed-systems engineering experience, strong programming skills, and expertise in production reliability and cloud infrastructure.
Shield AI
San Mateo, CA
Leads the design, implementation, integration, and field validation of tactical autonomy and multi-agent coordination capabilities for unmanned platforms. Requires 7+ years of relevant experience, production C++, technical leadership, and eligibility for a U.S. Secret clearance.
Snowflake
Bellevue, WA
Leads the roadmap and technical vision for Snowflake Feature Store, building reliable, high-performance machine learning platform capabilities and supporting technical execution across partner teams. Requires 10+ years of experience with data-serving infrastructure or ML platforms, plus Java and Python expertise.
Shield AI
Washington, DCLeads development and integration of advanced maritime autonomy for USVs, UUVs, and cooperating UAVs, including motion planning, localization, safety, and multi-agent coordination. Requires staff-level technical leadership, substantial robotics experience, C++ and Python proficiency, and eligibility for a SECRET clearance.
Ironclad
San Francisco, CA
Leads architecture and technical direction for agentic search systems combining LLMs, retrieval, and content-understanding pipelines for contract intelligence. The role requires 10+ years building production systems, deep search or LLM expertise, and strong cross-team technical leadership.