Staff Engineer

First American; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 7,500,000; Full time

Job summary

First American (India) is seeking a highly hands-on Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across teams and products. The role focuses on AI-assisted engineering, designing scalable systems, and mentoring senior engineers while delivering production-grade software.

Ideal candidates will demonstrate deep AWS experience, strong full-stack capabilities (TypeScript/Node.js, React/Next.js), and a track record of building reusable frameworks with robust security and observability.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Staff Engineer with cross-team impact and production delivery responsibilities.
• Experience leading complex initiatives through production delivery and adoption.
• Strong hands-on full-stack engineering skills and willingness to contribute directly to implementation.
• Deep experience with AWS and cloud-native, scalable, secure, and observable architectures.
• Excellent communication across engineering, product, architecture, and leadership groups.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-team and cross-product initiatives from design through production adoption.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, debug, and operate critical production software.
• Define architectural principles and guardrails while preserving team autonomy.
• Review high-risk designs for tradeoffs, failure modes, security concerns, and integration risks.
• Build shared frameworks, libraries, services, and tooling that improve quality and delivery speed.
• Create reusable AI workflows, evaluations, validation mechanisms, and safety guardrails.
• Establish standards for design, testing, code review, CI/CD, and release readiness.
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability.
• Lead major cross-product incident response and drive preventive actions.

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Architectural judgment

AI Engineering mindset

Security awareness

Communication skills

Problem solving

Education

15+ years formal education

Tools

AWS

TypeScript/Node.js

React/Next.js

GraphQL/REST

CI/CD

Observability

Security

Serverless

DynamoDB

Job description

Company Summary

First American (India) is a GCC (Global Capability Center) of the First American Financial Corporation (NYSE: FAF) family of companies. FAI is a proud member of the FORTUNE 500 companies and has been amongst the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eight consecutive years. First American Financial Corporation provides comprehensive title insurance, closing/settlement, property data and technology solutions. First American (India) creates quality solutions for its customers by combining software, back office, and knowledge processing operations to fulfill First American's business requirements. Our priorities are our employees, customers, and shareholders - in that order. First American (India) has been ranked amongst India's Best Companies To Work For™ 2023: Listed amongst the Top 100 by Great Place To Work® India, FAI is also certified Best Workplaces for Women and Workplace with Inclusive Practices. Software Services helps build First American's product suite that encompasses the best in class Title Insurance, Settlement and Mortgage solutions platforms. Leverages technology product stack across Microsoft platform predominantly to develop, enhance and maintain the best in class applications. The R & D division delivers solutions for the title insurance industry leveraging the best of NLP, AI and ML.

Job Summary Role Overview

We are looking for a highly hands-on Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership to join our engineering team. This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports. The ideal candidate will lead cross-team and cross-product initiatives, contribute directly to production software, establish engineering guardrails, build reusable frameworks and AI capabilities, and mentor senior engineers and technical leads. AI-assisted engineering is a baseline expectation. Strong experience with AWS, TypeScript/Node.js, React/Next.js, distributed systems, data architecture, security, and AI Engineering is required.

Competencies

• Lead cross-team and cross-product initiatives from design through production adoption
• Design, develop, test, deploy, debug, and operate critical production software
• Define architectural principles and guardrails while preserving team autonomy
• Review high-risk designs for tradeoffs, failure modes, security concerns, and integration risks
• Build shared frameworks, libraries, services, and tooling that improve quality and delivery speed
• Create reusable AI workflows, evaluations, validation mechanisms, and safety guardrails
• Apply AI responsibly across design, coding, testing, documentation, debugging, and analysis
• Establish standards for design, testing, code review, CI/CD, and release readiness
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability
• Lead major cross-product incident response and drive preventive actions
• Design APIs, event-driven systems, distributed workflows, integrations, and data models
• Translate product direction into technical strategies and implementation plans
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads and contribute to technical hiring

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated Staff Engineer-level impact across multiple teams, products, or domains
• Experience leading complex initiatives through production delivery and adoption
• Strong hands-on full-stack engineering skills and willingness to contribute directly to implementation
• Deep experience with AWS and cloud-native, scalable, secure, and observable architectures
• Strong proficiency with TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, REST, GraphQL, React, Next.js, frontend architecture and microservices
• Strong understanding of distributed and event-driven systems, including consistency, idempotency, retries, concurrency, and failure recovery
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools and agentic engineering workflows
• Ability to decompose work for AI agents, engineer context and constraints, define success criteria, and automate evaluation
• Understanding of AI limitations, trust boundaries, failure modes, data sensitivity, and human-review requirements
• Strong knowledge of application security, IAM, threat modeling, secure development, and data protection
• Experience designing reliable, scalable, observable, and operationally supportable systems
• Strong architectural judgment and experience building reusable capabilities adopted by multiple teams
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical decisions without formal authority
• Strong communication skills across engineering, product, architecture, and leadership groups

Preferred Skills

• Experience building internal AI agents, evaluation systems, context frameworks, or AI safety guardrails
• Experience defining engineering standards across multiple teams
• Experience improving developer productivity through shared platforms, automation, or paved-road solutions
• Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, EKS, API Gateway, EventBridge, Step Functions, S3, and DynamoDB
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated quality gates, and progressive delivery
• Experience with Datadog, CloudWatch, distributed tracing, service-level objectives, and incident reviews
• Experience modernizing complex systems or building B2B SaaS and enterprise software platforms

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who can move between organization-level architecture and production implementation. They define technical direction, build foundational software, and help multiple teams adopt it successfully. They think in systems, lead through influence, and mentor technical leaders. They apply AI Engineering with discipline, using context, constraints, evaluations, and human-review boundaries to improve delivery safely. They are motivated by reusable systems, stronger engineers, safer delivery, and more reliable products.

Technical Skills

• Backend: TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, REST, GraphQL. dotnet, C#
• Frontend: React, Next.js
• Architecture: Distributed Systems, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture
• Cloud: AWS, Serverless and Cloud-Native Services, Infrastructure as Code
• Data: Relational and NoSQL Databases, Data Integration and Integrity
• Security: IAM, Threat Modeling, Application and Cloud Security
• Engineering Practices: CI/CD, Automated Testing, Observability, Reliability, Code and Design Reviews
• AI Engineering: Coding Agents, Agent Workflows, Context Engineering, Evaluations, Validation, and Guardrails

Educational Qualification

Minimum of 15 years of formal education - Graduate / Post Graduate in Computer Science / Information Technology. Professional work experience of 8 to 12 years.

FAI is committed to create an environment that respects, supports and inspires all individuals. We do not discriminate on the basis of color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and age. At FAI, we celebrate diversity and believe that an inclusive workforce benefits employees, the organization and our community. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.