Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Vectara; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Vectara in the United States seeks a Senior/Staff Platform Software Engineer to build and scale core infrastructure powering our AI agent platform. You will design robust services, automate deployments, and improve reliability and performance.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product, research, and SRE teams; strong backend, cloud, and container expertise are required, including Kubernetes, IaC, and observability tools.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer focused on backend systems and platform engineering.
• Proficiency in Java and Python.
• Deep experience with cloud 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).
• 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

• Lead code, system design, and architecture reviews while 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

GCP

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK/EFK

ML workloads

Distributed systems

Kafka

Spark

Airflow

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

Kafka

Airflow

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK/EFK

Job description

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).