Senior / Staff Software Engineer, AI Systems & Platform

UtilityAPI; Oakland (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible remote schedule

11 paid company holidays

Unlimited PTO

401(k) with match

12 weeks of paid parental leave

$600 Home Office Setup Stipend

Job summary

UtilityAPI is seeking a Senior or Staff Engineer with AI experience to lead the architecture and hands-on delivery of an AI-native platform for utility data. You’ll define architecture, mentor engineers, and drive best practices across data, AI, and cloud-native services.

Join a small, data-heavy team at a time of rapid growth, shaping how AI is embedded into our product lifecycle while ensuring reliability, security, and cost efficiency in a regulated energy domain.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years working with core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, AI-native systems, or data-intensive platforms.
• Strong coding and system-level design skills in Python.
• Hands-on experience taking AI/ML or LLM-powered systems from prototype to reliable production, including experience with evaluation, data pipelines, retrieval, observability, or model integration.
• Experience designing or operating data-intensive systems that support AI/ML workloads, including structured, unstructured, or multimodal data.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for how we adopt AI across the product and engineering lifecycle.
• Identify, scope, and ship AI/ML capabilities that solve meaningful product and platform problems.
• Train, evaluate, and deploy models on our own large-scale structured data.
• Build agentic AI systems on managed platforms like AWS Bedrock with experience in embedding pipelines, vector retrieval, RAG infrastructure, and semantic search.
• Establish engineering patterns for AI systems, including evaluation, testing, observability, monitoring, and data-quality frameworks.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows to increase engineering efficacy.
• Mentor other engineers and champion AI literacy across the broader team.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

AI/ML systems

Mentorship

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Django

RESTful APIs

Job description

The US energy landscape is changing rapidly; we’re sprinting ahead with it, facilitating business between clean energy developers, utilities, and customers (big and small) looking to accelerate the energy transition equitably and affordably. As the energy industry as a whole moves toward adoption of artificial intelligence, UtilityAPI is looking for a Senior or Staff Engineer with AI experience and an interest in mentorship to join our team as we continue to bring order to one of the most fragmented markets in the country—utility data.

About the Role

We're a small, data-intensive engineering organization at an inflection point. We don't yet have an established AI architecture, AI-native product line, or AI-driven development cycles. We're looking for a senior/staff engineer to define the architecture, build the highest-value pieces themselves, establish the engineering practices around it, and bring the rest of the team along. You'll come in; assess our existing tech stack, data, and workflows end-to-end; identify where AI can meaningfully solve problems; and drive the proposed initiatives experimentation to reliable production systems.

You are the leader who will figure out what an AI-native architecture and development workflow should look like for our team and product, then lead the execution for both. This is a high-autonomy role for someone who can operate as both a strong individual contributor and an informal technical leader — someone comfortable being the most AI-experienced person in the room, identifying high-leverage technical gaps and mobilizing engineers and cross-functional partners to address them without relying on formal authority. That’s not to say you’ll be working alone; you’ll be part of a close-knit team, and supported by both your direct manager and the organization as a whole.

You are a responsible and thoughtful leader with a clear philosophy on AI, who will drive engineering best practices for AI data architecture, platform design, automation, testing, monitoring, and operational excellence within the constraints of the cautious, regulated sector of electric and gas utilities.

What You’ll Do

AI Integration & Strategy

• Own the technical direction for how we adopt AI across the product and engineering lifecycle. Assess our current stack, data, and workflows to define where AI can create the most leverage, and establish the technical architecture and infrastructure needed to support AI-native product capabilities. Develop and own a clear, pragmatic technical point of view on AI adoption across our product and engineering lifecycle and bring the rest of engineering along with you
• Identify, scope, and ship AI/ML capabilities that solve meaningful product and platform problems, taking them from experimentation through reliable production deployment
• Train, evaluate, and deploy models on our own large-scale structured data
• Build agentic AI systems on managed platforms like AWS Bedrock with experience in embedding pipelines, vector retrieval, RAG infrastructure, and semantic search
• Establish engineering patterns for AI systems, including evaluation, testing, observability, monitoring, and data-quality frameworks, while optimizing for reliability, latency, and cost
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows to increase engineering efficacy, and identify high-leverage opportunities for automation
• Mentor other engineers and champion AI literacy across the broader team, without gatekeeping the knowledge

Technical Debt & Platform Modernization

• Identify the highest-leverage gaps in our stack and practices, and drive the fixes
• Optimize platform scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost across our cloud environment
• Improve our large-scale data infrastructure, including large databases (3+ TB) and ETL pipelines with throughput over 100 GB/day
• Provide thoughtful and impactful analysis, recommendations, and direction on architecture

Team Participation & Mentorship

• Plan, estimate, review code, and document as part of a cross-functional Agile team
• Take on mentorship responsibilities that scale with your seniority
• Operate from a curiosity-first, collaborative, and kind mindset in a highly dynamic team that does not have information silos

Other Duties as Assigned

• We're a small team—expect to get hands-on outside your core focus area when needed

Your Experience & Skills

We have a diverse team of engineers from all backgrounds—we don’t particularly care about where you got your degree, or even if you have one. We’re interested in where you’re at in your career, where you want to go, and where you want to bring us. Please apply even if you don’t meet every single one of these criteria!

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 3+ years working with core database systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, AI-native systems, or data-intensive platforms
• Strong coding and system-level design skills in Python
• Hands-on experience taking AI/ML or LLM-powered systems from prototype to reliable production, including experience with evaluation, data pipelines, retrieval, observability, or model integration
• Experience designing or operating data-intensive systems that support AI/ML workloads, including structured, unstructured, or multimodal data
• Track record of introducing AI-assisted development tools and practices (e.g., agentic coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, etc.) to a team and driving real adoption, not just personal use
• Experience designing and building cloud-based applications, including compute services, database services, RESTful APIs, ETL pipelines, queues, and notification services
• Solid fundamentals in object-oriented design, data structures, algorithms, and problem-solving
• Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Relational database performance tuning experience (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar)
• Privacy- and security-conscious approach to system design, especially when handling sensitive data in AI-powered features
• Natural inclination towards facilitation: you have a clear grasp of org- and team-level priorities and you proactively jump in as needed to remove bottlenecks
• Ability and desire to mentor other engineers and raise the team's technical bar
• Curiosity, a willingness to learn what you don't yet know, and a team-first attitude

Nice to Have

• Experience building data ingestion, transformation, and publishing pipelines for structured, unstructured, or multimodal data
• Experience building internal tools or workflows that let non-engineering stakeholders safely contribute to code, review, or deployment
• Experience working in a regulated or sensitive-data environment (e.g., healthcare, banking)
• Hands-on Django experience, with in-depth knowledge of the framework

You Might Be Great for This Role If

• 'Perfect is the enemy of good' is basically your personal motto
• You'd rather talk through a knotty problem with someone else than muscle through it alone, and you encourage others to do the same
• People would describe you as flexible and open to change; when an idea doesn't pan out, you move on without your feelings getting hurt
• You enjoy navigating ambiguity, balancing intentionality with a bias toward action
• Your technical chops are top notch and you're looking for a highly flexible, collaborative environment to build additional skills that demonstrate your technical leadership

About Us:

Founded in 2014, UtilityAPI is a software company on a mission to unleash the future of energy by unlocking data.

UtilityAPI makes utility data secure and accessible for the broader energy ecosystem: our data exchange platform empowers utilities to effortlessly and confidently share crucial utility and energy data so that partners—developers, trade allies, NGOs, aggregators, and other stakeholders—can tap into utility data like never before. Integrated with reliable energy data, these parties can better serve consumers, prompting lower costs, improved services, and innovative technologies to accelerate the transition to clean, affordable energy.

Our team reflects a broad range of experiences, identities, and backgrounds. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been historically underrepresented and underestimated in tech, including people with disabilities; intersectional identities; and non-traditional education backgrounds and work histories.

Benefits and Perks:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision: We offer a Platinum level-equivalent Cigna Healthcare plan and high-quality plans through Beam for Dental & Vision. We cover 90-99% of premiums for employees and 50-75% for dependents, if enrolled.
• Flexible, fully remote schedule
• 11 paid company holidays
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k) with match
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave (eligible after 6 months of employment)
• $600 Home Office Setup Stipend

We are only hiring employees to work remotely in the following states: CA, CO, IL, MA, MI, NJ, NY, OH, OR, TX, VA, WA. UtilityAPI participates in the E-Verify program, and will provide the federal government with employees’ Form I-9 information to confirm authorization to work in the United States if hired. Please note we are not able to sponsor visas and are only able to hire US citizens, permanent residents, or others legally authorized to work in the US.

We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by law.