Senior Application Engineer

OuterBox is a company that specializes in building resilient software for complex internal applications. The Senior Application Engineer will focus on API development, data services, and integrating AI capabilities into the product suite, while collaborating on system design and development to meet user needs and company objectives.

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