AI-First Staff Engineer — Lead Scalable SaaS & Architecture

Appfolio; Santa Barbara (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio seeks a Staff Software Engineer in Santa Barbara, CA to lead architectural decisions and build robust, production-grade SaaS infrastructure for the Resident Concierge segment. You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Design, and ML teams, and help scale systems for growing demand using AI-assisted approaches.

You will drive technical excellence, maintainability, and rapid delivery in a high-growth environment while aligning with company strategy and customer value.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications.
• Proven track record leading high-stakes projects from ambiguity to launch and system health.
• Experience leading architectural discussions and guiding technical decisions.
• Proactively adopting AI tooling and validating AI-generated output to maintain excellence.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical vision and strategy across the Resident Concierge subsegment, aligning with business goals.
• Lead design and implementation of distributed systems to support 10x traffic growth.
• Coach engineers to foster a high-trust, autonomous culture with ownership.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and ML leaders to bridge AI potential and customer value.
• Own full lifecycle of solutions from discovery to production.
• Research and apply new technologies to improve quality and accelerate delivery.
• Utilize TDD, code reviews, and CI to deliver high-quality software and fix bugs.

Skills

Leadership

Architectural design

AI tooling adoption

Coaching engineers

Distributed systems

Test-driven development

Education

Bachelor/Master/PhD in CS

Tools

Golang

React

AWS

Service-oriented architectures

Job description

AppFolio seeks a Staff Software Engineer in Santa Barbara, CA to lead architectural decisions and build robust, production-grade SaaS infrastructure for the Resident Concierge segment. You will mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, Design, and ML teams, and help scale systems for growing demand using AI-assisted approaches.

You will drive technical excellence, maintainability, and rapid delivery in a high-growth environment while aligning with company strategy and customer value.