Staff Engineer, AI & Core Systems (0-to-1 to Production)

Zoho; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

FDE Team is seeking a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff to design, build, and scale production-grade software and AI systems across backend, data, and cloud layers.

This hands-on role requires deep experience in distributed systems, AI/ML, and modern infrastructure, with ownership from architecture to production. You will mentor others while writing production code and helping establish engineering standards.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on programming in Python, Go, Java, C++, TypeScript.
• Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, databases, and system design.
• Experience with AI/ML, LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, or production AI applications.
• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP; modern infrastructure incl. containers.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable production software and AI systems.
• Own complex engineering initiatives from 0→1 through production and scale.
• Architect backend services, APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities.
• Build production applications using Python and other modern languages.
• Develop and integrate LLM, RAG, agentic AI, retrieval, and intelligent workflows.
• Ensure reliability, security, observability, and fault tolerance in systems.
• Work with structured and unstructured data across modern databases and cloud infra.
• Create evaluation, monitoring, testing, and quality frameworks for production AI.
• Tackle performance, reliability, data, and infrastructure challenges.
• Make architectural decisions balancing speed and long-term maintainability.
• Prototype new capabilities and turn experiments into production systems.
• Collaborate with senior engineers, product stakeholders, and customer teams.
• Mentor engineers and help establish strong engineering standards.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

TypeScript

Distributed systems

APIs

Education

Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, AI/ML, or related technical discipline

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

FDE Team is seeking a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff to design, build, and scale production-grade software and AI systems across backend, data, and cloud layers.

This hands-on role requires deep experience in distributed systems, AI/ML, and modern infrastructure, with ownership from architecture to production. You will mentor others while writing production code and helping establish engineering standards.