Staff AI Platform Engineer — Remote

First American; Santa Ana (CA); On-site; USD 149,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

401k + PTO

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

First American in Santa Ana, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams, driving architecture, standards, and reusable platforms for AI-native software in real estate technology.

You will partner with product, security, and AI practitioners to solve high-impact challenges, modernize platforms, and raise engineering velocity while ensuring reliability and governance across distributed systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing and building production software systems.
• Demonstrated experience driving architecture across multiple teams, services, or business domains.
• Deep experience building cloud-native distributed systems using modern software engineering practices.
• Experience designing and operating production AI systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows.
• Strong experience creating reusable engineering platforms, frameworks, libraries, or shared infrastructure adopted across multiple teams.
• Expertise designing APIs, event-driven architectures, and highly available distributed systems.
• Experience establishing engineering standards, architectural patterns, and operational best practices across organizations.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical direction through influence rather than direct management.
• Deep understanding of AI operational concerns including evaluation strategies, model selection, latency optimization, cost management, observability, governance, and safety.
• Experience designing AI development workflows that improve engineering productivity through responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar.

Responsibilities

• Drive Cross-Organization Technical Strategy
• Define architectural direction, align engineering organizations around common approaches, and guide long-term technical investments that improve organizational scalability, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Navigate ambiguity, resolve competing priorities, and build consensus across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
• Build with AI Design and evolve the AI development practices and help drive the creation of AI powered products for our AI is not just transforming how we build, it changes what we build.
• Architect Complex Distributed Systems Define architecture for large-scale, distributed systems spanning multiple services, domains, and business capabilities.
• Drive architectural consistency around: APIs event-driven systems cloud infrastructure reliability security observability operational excellence.
• Simplify complex systems through thoughtful abstractions and reusable patterns.
• Raise the Engineering Bar Establish engineering standards that improve software quality across the organization.
• Lead architectural reviews, influence design decisions, and help engineering teams make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, simplicity, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Champion modern engineering practices including AI-assisted software development, automated testing, observability, continuous delivery, and platform engineering.
• Mentor Technical Leaders Multiply the effectiveness of senior engineers and technical leads through coaching, architectural guidance, and design mentorship.
• Help engineers grow their system thinking, technical judgment, and decision-making while creating an engineering culture centered on curiosity, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Drive Operational Excellence Lead initiatives that improve organizational reliability, resiliency, security, and operational maturity.
• Define engineering patterns for: observability production diagnostics AI evaluation latency budgets cost optimization incident response resiliency governance.
• Establish measurable engineering standards that improve the health of production systems over time.
• Collaborate Across the Organization Partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, solution architecture, security, platform engineering, infrastructure, and AI practitioners to translate business strategy into scalable technical solutions.
• Influence decisions through technical expertise, data, and strong communication rather than organizational authority.

Skills

Software architecture

Cloud-native distributed systems

AI production systems

Mentoring

Communication

System thinking

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

CDK

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Azure OpenAI

Job description

First American in Santa Ana, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams, driving architecture, standards, and reusable platforms for AI-native software in real estate technology.

You will partner with product, security, and AI practitioners to solve high-impact challenges, modernize platforms, and raise engineering velocity while ensuring reliability and governance across distributed systems.