Staff Software Engineer

CV in; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Vanilla is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own the design and delivery of applied AI features that redefine estate planning for advisors and clients. You will build scalable AI tooling, ingest and process structured data, and visualize results.

You will shape platform AI capabilities and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and legal teams. The role emphasizes production-grade AI infrastructure, observability, and end-to-end ownership in a remote US-based engagement.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of relevant experience in software development, data science, ML, or AI.
• Proficiency in Python or JavaScript.
• Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar platforms for chat and API interfaces.
• Strong understanding of ML/AI tech including training, evaluation, and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of applied AI applications using large language models to improve estate planning workflows.
• Architect services for ingesting AI results, ensuring scalability, observability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with product, engineers, and domain experts to optimize workflows and automate advisory processes.
• Develop model training, evaluation, inference serving, and monitoring tooling with modern ML frameworks.
• Design data ingestion pipelines to extract, transform, and load data into a centralized system.

Job description

Staff Software Engineer at vanilla.

About the role You will own the design and delivery of applied AI features that redefine estate planning for advisors and clients. You will partner with product and subject matter experts to translate complex workflows into reliable, scalable software solutions. You will leverage large language models to build high accuracy applications that ingest, process, and visualize structured estate planning data. You will construct services for results ingestion, monitoring, and alerting to ensure robust production performance. You will shape the technical direction of AI tooling and influence architectural decisions across the platform. You will mentor engineers and collaborate across disciplines to move quickly while maintaining quality and clarity. Here, your work will directly impact how wealth is transferred across generations and how a new category platform is built. If you are driven by hard technical problems and ownership of end to end outcomes, this role is your opportunity to leave a mark.

Key facts Location: Remote Engagement: full_time

What you\'ll do

• Lead the development of applied AI applications using large language models to achieve high accuracy and reliability in estate planning workflows.
• Architect and build services for ingesting structured results from AI models, ensuring scalability, observability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and subject matter experts to identify opportunities where AI can streamline or replace manual workflows.
• Develop model training, evaluation, inference serving, and monitoring tooling using modern ML frameworks and open source tools.
• Design data ingestion pipelines that identify, extract, transform, and load data from disparate sources into a centralized system.
• Normalize, cleanse, and validate data to ensure consistency, quality, and usability across the platform.
• Design and implement database schemas, optimize queries, and manage database performance to support AI driven features.
• Build and maintain tooling for model evaluation, inference serving, alerting, and performance monitoring using techniques such as LangChain and LangGraph.
• Use retrieval augmented generation and chunking strategies to tune large language model performance for precise estate planning outputs.
• Orchestrate complex AI workflows and decision frameworks to support agentic capabilities and automated advisory processes.
• Contribute to evaluation testing frameworks and experiment with exposure to agentic workflows to improve reliability and outcomes.
• Work with advisors, planners, and attorneys to capture requirements and ensure software solutions align with real world estate planning needs.
• Communicate technical challenges and solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Navigate ambiguous and undefined problems by thinking abstractly while maintaining focus on practical implementation details.
• Adhere to professional software engineering practices and the full software development life cycle including coding standards, code reviews, source control, testing, and operations.

Requirements

• Hold a Bachelor\'s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or demonstrate equivalent practical experience.
• Bring 8+ years of relevant work experience in software development, data science, machine learning, or artificial intelligence.
• Show proficiency in modern programming languages such as Python or JavaScript.
• Demonstrate experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar platforms for both chat and API interfaces.
• Exhibit a deep understanding of machine learning and AI technologies, including designing, training, and implementing machine learning models.
• Apply natural language processing techniques for automation within real world applications.
• Deliver production experience with scalability and best practices of AI infrastructure.
• Use AI observability, monitoring, and signaling with tools like LangChain or LangGraph in production systems.
• Employ hands on experience with retrieval augmented generation and chunking to tune large language model performance.
• Work with LLM orchestration tooling and decision frameworks to build reliable workflows.
• Have experience or exposure building agentic capabilities and workflows that support estate planning scenarios.
• Have experience or exposure to evaluation testing frameworks for measuring accuracy and reliability.
• Articulate technical challenges and solutions effectively to both technical and non technical audiences.
• Thrive in environments with ambiguous or undefined problems while maintaining structured, abstract thinking.
• Understand and follow professional software engineering practices and standards for the full software development life cycle.
• Be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for sponsorship now or in the future, as Vanilla is unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

Nice to have

• Preferred backgrounds in estate planning, wealth management, or legal technology that align domain context with AI applications.
• Experience with SaaS startup environments where speed, autonomy, and impact are prioritized.
• Familiarity with collaborative tools and distributed team workflows across multiple time zones.

Practical notes This is a full time remote role based in the United States. The position requires eligibility to work without sponsorship, and Vanilla is currently unable to support visa sponsorship. The successful candidate will engage with a distributed team and must thrive in a fast moving, autonomous environment.