2026-11 Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Vectara; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision

HSA or FSA option

Generous PTO, holidays, and rest days

Professional development

Team building activities

Job summary

Vectara is hiring a Senior/Staff Platform Software Engineer to build and scale the core infrastructure powering our AI agent platform. You’ll craft robust services, automate deployments, and improve observability and reliability at scale.

You will lead architecture reviews, mentor teammates, and collaborate with product engineering and research to deploy ML/NLP workloads in production. This role emphasizes security, performance, and developer experience.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on backend systems and platform engineering.
• Proficiency in Java and Python.
• Deep experience with all computing environments (GCP, AWS, Onprem, or Azure).
• Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, etc.).
• Experience working on ML platforms or supporting ML workloads in production.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems.
• Familiarity with data infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Airflow).

Responsibilities

• Proficiency in AI-assisted coding; able to do multiple tasks at once and manage AI agents to execute quickly and thoughtfully.
• Lead code, system design, and architecture reviews while teaching and mentoring team members.
• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and secure backend services and platform components.
• Drive infrastructure automation, CI/CD, and monitoring/alerting pipelines.
• Collaborate with product engineering and research teams to deploy, scale, and optimize ML/NLP workloads.
• Lead initiatives to improve system reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
• Contribute to architecture and infrastructure decisions as we scale our platform.
• Champion best practices in code quality, testing, and DevOps culture across the team.

Skills

Java

Python

Backend systems

Platform engineering

Cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK/EFK

Job description

Vectara provides a scalable platform to deploy your Enterprise AI Agents and AI Assistants with Accuracy, Security, and Explainability like no other solution. Our enterprise RAG Platform offers unparalleled Accuracy, Security, and Explainability by leveraging the strongest models for retrieval, embedding, reranking, an optimized LLM trained for quality, and advanced Hallucination Mitigation. We are the developers of the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model and Correction model, core to ensuring accuracy, quality, and responsible AI that is production ready. These innovations have been cited in the New York Times, Visual Capitalist, and many other leading publications. This platform has allowed us to be very successful with over 100 Enterprise clients including the likes of large US military organizations, Financial services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.

Our founding team includes industry veterans and experts in neural information retrieval and distributed systems from Google. Join us as we pursue our mission to help the world find meaning. People at Vectara are passionate about ensuring customers take advantage of breakthroughs in applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve real-world technology and business problems today. Our team is a group of unquestionable all-stars in their respective fields of computer science and business from Google, Cloudera, Splunk, MongoDB, Elastic, and more.

Role Overview

Vectara is seeking a Senior/Staff Platform Software Engineer with strong experience in backend development and modern DevOps practices. In this role, you’ll work on building and scaling the core infrastructure that powers our AI agent platform. You’ll help design robust services and scalable systems, with a focus on automation, observability, reliability, and performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Proficiency in AI-assisted coding; able to do multiple tasks at once and manage AI agents to execute quickly and thoughtfully.
• Lead code, system design, and architecture reviews while teaching and mentoring team members.
• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and secure backend services and platform components.
• Drive infrastructure automation, CI/CD, and monitoring/alerting pipelines.
• Collaborate with product engineering and research teams to deploy, scale, and optimize ML/NLP workloads.
• Lead initiatives to improve system reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
• Contribute to architecture and infrastructure decisions as we scale our platform.
• Champion best practices in code quality, testing, and DevOps culture across the team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on backend systems and platform engineering.
• Proficiency in Java and Python.
• Deep experience with all computing environments (GCP, AWS, Onprem, or Azure).
• Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.)
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, etc.).
• Experience working on ML platforms or supporting ML workloads in production.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems.
• Familiarity with data infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Airflow).

Equity and Salary Range

Salary is just one component of Vectara’s employee compensation. Our full-time employees are also equity owners in the company, which although not an immediate cash component, can have positive impacts on long-term total compensation for each participating employee. We would be remiss if we didn’t highlight and celebrate our focus on engaging many of our employees in being economic co-owners of the business.

Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious. After all, we are on a mission to find meaning.

Perks and Benefits

• 100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision begins on your first day!
• Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA).
• Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time, holidays, and company rest days.
• Professional development and training opportunities.
• Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more.