Senior Application Engineer

OuterBox is a company focused on designing and building resilient software for complex internal applications, and they are seeking a Senior Application Engineer. The role involves integrating AI capabilities into the product suite and managing API development, data services, and cloud-based infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate in designing and building resilient, AI-integrated software for complex internal applications, with emphasis on API development, data services, and cloud infrastructure
• Build and maintain AI-powered features within internal applications, integrating APIs from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
• Write and manage application code, scripts, and automations using JavaScript, Python, and PHP
• Perform data management using MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Identify and resolve complex technical issues — including those specific to AI integration, model behavior, and API reliability — both independently and collaboratively, ensuring smooth operation across all systems and components
• Maintain clear, precise documentation of code, AI workflows, system behaviors, and processes
• Wield AI effectively across the full development lifecycle - using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and AI-enabled CLI utilities to accelerate coding, code review, debugging, and testing
• Lead the implementation phase by overseeing code quality, performing reviews, and ensuring solutions follow best practices - including those specific to AI-integrated systems
• Provide mentorship and guidance to the development team, including on AI integration approaches, development tooling, and application architecture

Requirements:

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and maintaining production systems. Demonstrated exemplary performance may supersede the experience requirement
• Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, time/space complexity, and object-oriented and functional design patterns — with the ability to apply them across languages
• Comfortable picking up new languages and frameworks as needed; current stack exposure to a modern JS framework (Vue/React) and a server-side language (PHP, Python, or Node) is helpful but not required
• Experience integrating third-party APIs (including generative AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google) into production, with a clear understanding of rate limits, retries, idempotency, schema design, and failure modes
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent CLI and agentic coding tools — as a regular part of a professional engineering workflow
• Familiarity with AI DevOps practices: using AI tooling across the SDLC for code review, automated testing, deployment pipelines, and application monitoring
• Solid experience with SQL for data manipulation and analysis
• Proven ability to build, deploy, and manage applications in cloud environments, specifically AWS
• Experience designing and implementing well-structured APIs for data integration across systems, with fluency in at least one paradigm (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, or event-driven/messaging) and an understanding of when each is appropriate
• Experience working with structured data and running extract, load, and transform (ETL) processes
• Strong debugging and systems-thinking skills: able to isolate issues across layers (client, service, data, infra) and reason about non-deterministic behavior, including in AI-integrated systems
• Effective communication with the ability to break down technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
• Laravel familiarity is a plus
• Familiarity with data tools like Pandas is a plus