Staff Software Engineer (AI-Native Platform) - Remote

First American is a people-first company developing AI-native technology products for the real estate industry. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership across engineering teams, define architecture and standards, and drive reusable cloud-native platforms and production AI systems. The role also includes mentoring technical leaders and improving reliability, security, observability, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Lead technical initiatives that span multiple teams, products, and domains. Define architectural direction, align engineering organizations around common approaches, and guide long-term technical investments that improve organizational scalability, reliability, and developer productivity
• Navigate ambiguity, resolve competing priorities, and build consensus across engineering, product, and business stakeholders
• Design and evolve the AI development practices and help drive the creation of AI powered products for our
• AI is not just transforming how we build, it changes what we build. We are looking for a Staff Engineer who can help mentor teams on both
• Define architecture for large-scale, distributed systems spanning multiple services, domains, and business capabilities
• Drive architectural consistency around:
• APIs
• Event-driven systems
• Cloud infrastructure
• Reliability
• Security
• Observability
• Operational excellence
• Simplify complex systems through thoughtful abstractions and reusable patterns
• Establish engineering standards that improve software quality across the organization
• Lead architectural reviews, influence design decisions, and help engineering teams make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, simplicity, scalability, reliability, and cost
• Champion modern engineering practices including AI-assisted software development, automated testing, observability, continuous delivery, and platform engineering
• Multiply the effectiveness of senior engineers and technical leads through coaching, architectural guidance, and design mentorship
• Help engineers grow their system thinking, technical judgment, and decision-making while creating an engineering culture centered on curiosity, ownership, and continuous improvement
• Lead initiatives that improve organizational reliability, resiliency, security, and operational maturity
• Define engineering patterns for:
• Observability
• Production diagnostics
• AI evaluation
• Latency budgets
• Cost optimization
• Incident response
• Resiliency
• Governance
• Establish measurable engineering standards that improve the health of production systems over time
• Partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, solution architecture, security, platform engineering, infrastructure, and AI practitioners to translate business strategy into scalable technical solutions
• Influence decisions through technical expertise, data, and strong communication rather than organizational authority

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience designing and building production software systems, including significant experience leading large-scale technical initiatives
• Demonstrated experience driving architecture across multiple teams, services, or business domains
• Deep experience building cloud-native distributed systems using modern software engineering practices
• Experience designing and operating production AI systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
• Strong experience creating reusable engineering platforms, frameworks, libraries, or shared infrastructure adopted across multiple teams
• Expertise designing APIs, event-driven architectures, and highly available distributed systems
• Experience establishing engineering standards, architectural patterns, and operational best practices across organizations
• Demonstrated experience leading technical direction through influence rather than direct management
• Deep understanding of AI operational concerns including evaluation strategies, model selection, latency optimization, cost management, observability, governance, and safety
• Experience designing AI development workflows that improve engineering productivity through responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar
• Strong understanding of software architecture, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and platform design
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering organizations through coaching and technical leadership
• Strong systems thinking with an outcome-oriented mindset focused on creating durable organizational leverage
• Enterprise AI platforms (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks)
• C# (.NET), Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, or similar languages
• Kubernetes, Docker, and modern platform engineering practices
• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or similar tooling
• Observability platforms including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar
• Large-scale platform modernization or cloud migration initiatives
• Highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, or similar