Staff Software Engineer

Pax8 is a technology marketplace that connects partners, vendors, and small to midsized businesses through AI-powered insights and product support. The Staff Software Engineer will own, build, harden, and operate technically complex systems with organization-wide impact, while driving technical strategy, mentoring engineers, managing safety risks, and adopting emerging techniques. The role also focuses on AI evaluation infrastructure, responsible AI practices, and delivering measurable outcomes across the full system lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Own, build, and operate a system that is hard enough to need its own technical strategy and technically deep in its own right, and help drive the technical specs behind it
• Make consequential calls about what to build, scale, or kill on ambiguous problems where the data does not answer the question, driving them to clarity through iteration and collaboration, and own the outcome
• Exercise Systems Thinking past your own ownership boundary: see and optimize the whole line end to end, and change your own plan, or push back on someone else's, when the end-to-end view says the locally optimal move is globally wrong. Pursue the real fix, by influencing, contributing, or escalating, even when it lives in a system you don't own
• Own the work yourself: your domain is yours to run, so address the high-leverage problems in it, scope the solutions, and build them with a workforce of agents behind you
• Instrument what you ship for adoption and usage from the start, and hold any claim of delivered value to a falsifiable, data-backed standard
• Scale your own judgment into others: mentor engineers toward owning highly complex systems rather than only reviewing their output
• Apply a categorically higher bar to safety, security, and irreversible-consequence risk: identify and close it out before it ships, covering both classic engineering risk (data loss, security vulnerabilities) and AI-specific risk (misuse, jailbreaks, unintended capability, data exposure), including deciding what not to ship when everything else is ready
• Run the full lifecycle for adopting new techniques (discovery, spike, prototype, proof of concept, hardened production) in your problem space
• Write documentation precise enough that other teams can consume your systems as a service without a standing coordination meeting

Requirements:

• Understand AI capabilities and limitations and apply that judgment in daily engineering decisions
• Use enterprise-approved AI tools (Claude) as primary productivity accelerators across the full development lifecycle
• Apply Pax8 data classification and privacy principles before sharing any data with AI systems
• Practice responsible AI: recognize and mitigate bias, uphold fairness and transparency requirements
• Advanced prompting proficiency: multi-turn context setting, chain-of-thought elicitation, structured output enforcement, and iterative refinement
• Build and own eval and validation infrastructure for AI-assisted or AI-native systems within your problem space, the layer that determines whether output is correct rather than merely plausible
• Apply elevated scrutiny to agent-produced code within a highly complex system
• Track state-of-the-art techniques and AI-specific vulnerability classes as they evolve, and be the one who notices when either changes and the one who ships the response into production
• To fulfil this role, you must hold valid right to work in United States
• Track record of being the de facto owner of a problem space that most of the organization depends on, earned by building and running it rather than by advising on it
• Experience mentoring other Software Engineers toward owning highly complex systems
• Experience taking a technique from a paper or external source through prototype and proof of concept into a hardened, safety-reviewed production rollout